HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in French about three anthropologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas) and the anthropology of the Bible.

Adler, Alfred, 2021. “L’anthropologie structurale et l’interprétation de textes bibliques” [Transl. “Structural Anthropology and the Interpretation of Biblical Texts”], in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The structural analysis of myths as theorized and practiced by Lévi-Strauss has proved its worth, as is shown by the imposing sum constituted by his Mythologiques. It was the philosopher Paul Ricoeur who pointed out the limits of this method by asking why it should only be applied to the myths of non-literate societies and why it is inappropriate for texts such as the Bible. Two eminent British anthropologists, Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, and indeed Lévi-Strauss himself, overrode this ‘taboo’ as if to challenge not the limits of structural analysis itself, but the status of the Bible as ‘holy scripture,’ which is nonetheless amenable to a strictly scientific approach.

Leach in his essay “The Legitimacy of Solomon” sought to shed light on what he called the ideology of kingship in ancient Israel by analyzing the contradictions between settlement in a promised land populated by idolatrous tribes and the religious ideal of purity involving endogamy. As a result, his object is not myth per se but a hybrid material, “myth-history,” which cannot be the subject of a structural analysis. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, dealt with the theme of the “abominations of Leviticus,” which were part of the priestly code. In this erudite article, Adler considers that this is undoubtedly a well-conducted structural analysis, but that it stumbles over the notion of holiness, a divine attribute that does not fit into the framework of oppositions between pure and impure or sacred and profane, familiar in religious anthropology. Finally, Lévi-Strauss, in the brief article “Exodus on Exodus,” a challenge and also a playful exercise, made a piquant but hazardous comparison between circumcision, the initiation ritual among the ancient Hebrews, and the removal of the penile sheath in initiation among the Bororo of Brazil. Lévi-Strauss shed little light on the three very mysterious biblical verses that recount the circumcision of Moses, who was first threatened with death by a demon god who descended upon him in the desert, only to let him accomplish his mission with the Pharaoh: to bring the people of Israel out of slavery. Why are these three essays disappointing, why do they add little to the discipline of Biblical criticism? This is what French Africanist anthropologist Alfred Adler attempts to answer in a thorough and sophisticated analysis.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an in-depth analysis of Gregory Bateson’s theoretical body of work by Peter Harries-Jones.

Harries-Jones, Peter, 2021. “‘From Anthropology to Epistemology’: Extensions to an Autobiography of Gregory Bateson,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in Great Britain and trained at Cambridge (in particular by A. C. Haddon), Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was an anthropologist who crossed disciplinary boundaries and profoundly altered the epistemology of the human sciences. Peter Harries-Jones gives an in-depth analysis of his theoretical body of work. His first fieldwork took place between 1927 and 1930 in New Guinea among the Baining, the Sulka, and then the Iatmul. His analysis of one of their rituals inspired him to coin the concept of schismogenesis, which he used in his famous book Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (1936). He spent two years in Bali (1936-1938) with Margaret Mead, whom he married in 1936, focusing on the education of children. They made a documentary film, Dance and Trance in Bali (1942), which marked a milestone in the history of ethnographic films. During WWII, he worked for the OSS in Southeast Asia. As one of the first participants in the Macy Lectures in the 1940s, along with Margaret Mead, he understood the importance of cybernetic theory and the centrality of information in cultural and biological processes. When working as an ethnologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, he founded the Palo Alto School, which developed an innovative approach to schizophrenia by forging the double-bind theory in 1956, making him one of the pioneers of family therapy. He developed an ambitious anthropology of communication linked to a theory of learning and social interactions and to a systems theory that embraced his holistic vision of the relationship between culture, evolution, and the environment. In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), he expressed his deep and aesthetic commitment to an ecological anthropology that rejects the dualism of nature/culture and body/spirit. He is one of the founders of biosemiotics.

After reading this piece, the reader grasps how much Bateson’s anthropology is still deeply relevant to our changing world, a world challenged by environmental upheavals and new scientific discoveries in cultural, biological and cognitive processes.

The next meeting of the 2021 History of Anthropology Working Group hosted by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine will be held on Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00pm ET via Zoom. There are no advance readings: instead, we will be hearing and discussing the work of some of the editors of the History of Anthropology Review who presented papers at the 2021 American Anthropological Association (AAA) and History of Science Society (HSS) conferences this November.

They’ll summarize their work, discuss the conference reactions, and reflect on the state of History of Anthropology as shown in these two conferences:

PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE
Patricia Martins Marcos: Racialized Knowledges: Manipulating Nature, Blackness, and Epistemic Disciplining in the Portuguese Inquisition.
Tracie Canada: Vindication, Imagination, and Decolonization: African Americans and the Experience of Anthropology (George W. Stocking, Jr. Symposium).
Nick Barron: Cultural Islands: The Pluralistic Politics of Anthropology.
Cameron Brinitzer : Social Learning Mechanisms: The Evolution of Culture and Its Sciences.
Matthew Hoffarth: Interactions with the Rorschach: Anthony F.C. Wallace and Mel Spiro’s Criticisms of the Culture Concept.

Additional details about the group and information on how to attend may be found on the Consortium website. Questions may be directed to John Tresch at john.tresch@sas.ac.uk.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in English about the intertwined works of the artist Carl Arriens and Africanist anthropologist Leo Frobenius in the latter’s famous book, Und Afrika Sprach (The Voice of Africa).

Fardon, Richard & Richard Kuba, 2021. “Adding Colour to Und Afrika Sprach: Carl Arriens’ Image and Leo Frobenius’ Text” (Colourization by Agnès Boulmer), in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The prolific artist Carl Arriens, one of three European members of Leo Frobenius’s fourth Africa expedition to Nigeria and Kamerun in 1910–12, provided many of the striking images that accompany the text of Frobenius’s monumental account of their research, quickly published in the three volumes of Und Afrika Sprach (The Voice of Africa) in 1912–13. In this illustrated essay Fardon and Kuba draw upon a range of evidence, including archives and ethnography as well as the published narrative, to question the relationship between what the members of the expedition did and saw, and how their experience went on to be represented to a readership in words and images. Their analysis was provoked by Arriens’s vivid depiction of a scene that, at once, could never have occurred and yet is congruent both with the text and with other images. Using this as an exemplary instance, their analysis radiates out to examine a range of images in different mediums that reflect concerns and presumptions shared by the narrative. Arriens’s exemplary image, they conclude, was produced by a technique of totalizing combinatorial collage, which is also, the two authors argue, the method behind Frobenius’s evocations of The Voice of Africa.

HAR is please to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in French about the German anthropologist, philologist and philosopher Heymann Steinthal.

Bondi, Davide, 2021. “La Psychologie des peuples, entre histoire, langue et culture : la pensée et l’œuvre de Heymann Steinthal” [Transl.: “Völkerpsychologie, between History, Language and Culture: The Thought and Work of Heymann Steinthal”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Heymann Steinthal, together with his brother-in-law and friend Moritz Lazarus, was the founder of the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, one of the most influential forums of European philosophical discussion in the second half of the nineteenth century. The theoretical project of the journal was linked to the legacy of Hegel and Herbart, taking from the former the idea that the mind is a “subject” and from the latter the proposal of “psychology” as a fundamental science of the mind. The “psychology of peoples” could then become a field of elaboration and coordination of the concepts inherent in the multiple sciences that study cultural phenomena. This is because these phenomena are the result and symbolic expression of the psychic processes of historical or living societies. In his writings, Steinthal turned in particular to the problems of language from the description of the grammatical structures of different African, Asian and European languages. From the descriptive to the reflexive level, he developed a theory of the evolution of speech communities which emphasised the plurality of spiritual centres that could be systematically reconstructed by means of a ‘morphological classification’ which is attentive to differences. In this ambitious article unfolding Steinthal’s thinking, Bondi points out that the episteme thus developed served as a stimulus for the development of sociology and ethnology in the twentieth century.

After a two-year pandemic delay, this two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS) will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross-disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, history, international relations, law, and linguistics. The conference aims to build upon the recent emergence of work and conversation on cross-disciplinary themes in the postwar history of the social sciences.

Submissions are welcome in such areas including, but not restricted to:

• The interchange of social science concepts and figures among the academy and wider intellectual and popular spheres
• Comparative institutional histories of departments and programs
• Border disputes and boundary work between disciplines as well as academic cultures
• Themes and concepts developed in the history and sociology of natural and physical science, reconceptualized for the social science context
• Professional and applied training programs and schools, and the quasi-disciplinary fields (like business administration) that typically housed them
• The role of social science in post-colonial state-building governance
• Social science adaptations to the changing media landscape
• The role and prominence of disciplinary memory in a comparative context
• Engagements with matters of gender, sexuality, race, religion, nationality, disability and other markers of identity and difference

The two-day conference will be organized as a series of one-hour, single-paper sessions attended by all participants. Ample time will be set aside for intellectual exchange between presenters and attendees, as all participants are expected to read pre-circulated papers in advance.

Proposals should contain no more than 1000 words, indicating the originality of the paper. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is February 4, 2022. Final notification will be given in early March 2022 after proposals have been reviewed. Completed papers will be expected by May 13, 2022.

The organizing committee consists of Jamie Cohen-Cole (George Washington University), Philippe Fontaine (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay), Jeff Pooley (Muhlenberg College), Mark Solovey (University of Toronto), and Marga Vicedo (University of Toronto).

All proposals and requests for information should be sent to submissions@hisress.org.

The Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History invites applications for an anthropologist to serve as Supervisory Research Anthropologist/Manager of the National Anthropological Archives (NAA), which includes the Human Studies Film Archives.

The NAA holds the largest known collection of historical and contemporary materials documenting the world’s cultures and the history of anthropology via a wide array of media types. Indigenous communities, anthropologists, folklorists, historians, film scholars and national and international researchers and filmmakers are the primary users of the collections. 

The Manager manages the NAA, and develops collections goals and plans, including preparation of annual budget in alignment with the Department and NMNH’s goals and plans. The position also oversees the processing of archival collections and preparation for digitization, including organization, arrangement, description (finding aids and inventories) and preservation, and the tracking of these activities. The Manager will also oversee the collections information systems used by the NAA, as well as the preservation, security and safekeeping of the archival and film collections.  The Manager will supervise staff and contract archivists as well as interns and volunteers. Additional duties include representing the NAA within NMNH and the Smithsonian, as well as being an active part of the collections management team at NMNH.

This position will be offered as a permanent Federal position and the position will be filled at the GS-13 level, which starts at $103,690 per year. U.S. citizenship is required.  College transcripts and proof of U.S. accreditation for foreign study must be submitted online by the closing date of announcement or your application will be disqualified.  For complete requirements and application procedures go to www.sihr.si.edu  or www.usajobs.gov and refer to Announcement #: 22A-JW-306791-DEU-NMNH (open to public candidates); or 22A-JW-306791A-MPA-NMNH (open to current/former federal candidates). 

All supporting documentation must be received online by 11/30/2021. Applicants will be notified by email when their applications are received.

To learn more about the Department of Anthropology, please view our website.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research complex with over 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research facilities. The Department of Anthropology is one of seven research departments at the National Museum of Natural History. The NAA Manager will join a large and diverse department with 52 full-time staff, including 12 curators in three research divisions: archaeology, ethnology and biological anthropology, along with the Collections Program  and the Repatriation Office.  The Anthropology collections hold over 3.6 million archaeological objects, over 200,000 ethnology objects, over 9,000 linear feet of archival documents, and 8 million running feet of ethnographic film and video. 

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held online and in-person in Baltimore, MD, on November 17-21, 2021. The theme of this year’s meeting is “Truth and Responsibility”; a full schedule and additional details may be found on the Association’s website.

The News Editors at HAR are pleased to highlight several panels of interest to our readers. Event times are listed in Eastern Time (U.S.) and registration is required to attend in-person and online. Our thanks to Grant Arndt, co-director of the History of Anthropology Interest Group, for sharing news of these and other events related to the history of anthropology.

Thursday, November 18 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

Session (2-1620) Anthropology at St. Louis and
Before

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 341

Sean O’Neill, “An Unfair Hearing for Global Cultural
Diversity: The Saint Louis World’s Fair as a Sounding Board for Primitivism, Racism, and Colonialism”

Christopher Lowman, “Imagining Asia Beyond the Exhibition”

Richard Warms, “Picture this: Boas, Photography and the Popular Presentation of Science”

Robert Launay, “Genealogies of the Secular and Sovereign State”

Discussant: Jon McGee

Thursday, November 18 2:00 – 3:45 PM ET

(2-1460) Entangled Histories and Bundles of Relations: Contemporary Ethnographic Work In and Around Collections

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 330

Panelists:

Catherine Nichols, Diana Marsh, Kristin Otto, Christopher Berk, Howard Morphy

Thursday, November 18 6:30 – 8:15 PM ET

Session (2-1621) Anthropology and Activism

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Martin Schoenhals, Carol Mukhopadhyay, Yolanda Moses, Kathleen Fine-Dare, Linda Seligmann, Raymond Schwartz, Jeanne Simonelli

Session (2-0740) The World-Builders

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Andrew Foster, Mariel Gruszko, Llerena Searle, Keith Murphy, Lee Cabatingan, Britt Van Paepeghem, Matthew C. Watson

Session (2-1190) Making Historical Truth: Material Engagements with the Past and the Politics of Responsibility after Mass Violence

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Hilary Leathem, Chris Green, Dominic Bryan, Damani Partridge, Jonathan Evershed, Sultan Doughan, Michal Ran-Rubin, Jonah Rubin

Friday, November 19 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

Session (3-2520) Alfred L. Kroeber: The Man, His Work and His Legacy

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 331

Herbert S. Lewis, “Alfred L. Kroeber: The Man, His Times, and His Work”

Stanley Brandes, “Alfred Kroeber and the Forging of a Discipline”

Paul Shankman, “Kroeber, Mead, and the Perils of Public Anthropology”

James Stanlaw, “Alfred Kroeber and the Development of Linguistic Anthropology”

Jack Glazier, “The Kroeber-Ishi Story: Cinematic Versions”

Nicholas Barron, “Anthros, Agents, and Federal (Un)Acknowledgment in Native California”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Goodbye Kroeber, Kroeber Hall, and the Man Called Ishi”

Session (3-2330) Enduring Legacies of Ethnographic Field Schools, Part 1

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Natalie Bourdon, Linda Easley, A Katherine Lambert-Pennington, Suzanne Kent, Keri Brondo, Tim Wallace, Quetzil Castaneda, Douglas Hume

(3-2122) Native Americans and Museums: International Perspectives and Collaborative Prospects.

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Robert Collins, Justin Richland, Alaka Wali, Markus Lindner

Friday, November 19 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM ET

Session (3-2320) Enduring Legacies of Ethnographic Field Schools, Part 2

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Tim Wallace, Keri Brondo, Bill Roberts, Walter Adams, James McDonald, Sharon Gmelch

Friday, November 19 4:15 PM – 6:00 PM ET

Session (3-1750) Vindication, Imagination, and Decolonization: African Americans and the Experience of Anthropology (The George W. Stocking, Jr. Symposium)

Location: Livestreamed and In-Person, Baltimore, Holiday Ballroom

Abstract: As we commemorate 50 years of the Association of Black Anthropologists, it is incumbent to recognize that African Americans have been bearing witness, taking action, and holding scholars accountable to the truth since the very beginning of anthropology in North America. Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote a critical response to Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind in 1854. During every twist and turn in the history of anthropology, African American scholars have taken on the responsibility to insist that anthropology be a holistic social science that combats racism and oppression and leads to a more responsive and inclusive understanding of what it means to be human. At the same time, anthropologists throughout the African Diaspora have described and analyzed how violence, power, and oppression lead to atrocities and the worst forms of inhumanity. In this panel, we take a look at a sample of African American intellectuals who were leaders in the vindication struggle, were creative and imaginative describing culture, and worked hard towards achieving a decolonized anthropology.

Panelists:

Deborah Johnson-Simon, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Lee D. Baker, Riché Barnes, Irma McClaurin, Rachel Watkins, Tracie Canada, Michael Blakey

Saturday, November 20 4:15 PM – 6:00PM ET

(4-3290) Clinical Encounters Across Difference: (Ac)countability and the Politics of Representation

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:
Molly Fitzpatrick, Allison Odger, Adrienne Strong, Margaret MacDonald, Hatice Nilay Erten, Thandeka Cochrane, Cal Biruk

Sunday, November 21 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

(5-0010) Historical Consciousness and Historicist Reckonings with the Anthropological Present

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:
David Dinwoodie, Jim Weil, Kathryn Kozaitis, Nicholas Barron, Grant Arndt, Olga Glinskii, Paul Mitchell

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in French) on the German anthropologist and philosopher Theodor Waitz.

Espagne, Michel, 2021. “Une anthropologie sans races” : vie et œuvre de Theodor Waitz” [Transl.: “An Anthropology Without Races: Life and Work of Theodor Waitz”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

This article gives a theoretical overview of Theodor Waitz (1821-1864), a German philosopher who became a key figure in the anthropological and ethnological sciences in the nineteenth century. Initially interested in individual psychology as an integral part of the natural sciences, he eventually placed the social context in its ethnic diversity at the centre of his attention. His major work, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, consisting of six volumes published between 1859 and 1864, systematised a vast ethnographic and philological literature and proposed a psychology of peoples that was more empirical than speculative. In this challenging article, Espagne reveals that Waitz was attentive to the symbolic perception of reality in different human societies; that he did not ignore physiological data, but radically questioned the notion of race. At the crossroads of several disciplines, his anthropology had international repercussions and remains an essential reference point in the history of the discipline. His body of work is one of the sources of the notion of Geisteswissenschaften as coined by Dilthey.

The second meeting of the History of Anthropology Network (HOAN-M) will take place on Friday, November 19, 2021, at 17:00 CET. The meeting will take place via Zoom.

HOAN Correspondents from Brazil (Peter Schröder), Canada (Joshua Smith), Portugal (Patrícia Ferraz de Matos), Romania (Alina Branda), and Turkey (Hande Birkalan-Gedik) will present the historiography of anthropological sciences in their respective countries, thus enriching our knowledge and perspectives.

The meeting will also feature a keynote lecture from Thomas Hylland Eriksen titled “Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery.” An abstract may be found below.

Those wishing to attend are encouraged to contact HOAN co-conveners Fabiana Dimpflmeier & Frederico Delgado Rosa to receive the link to join the Zoom call: hoan.easa@gmail.com

“Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery”

There are many unknown pioneers in the history of anthropology, often publishing in smaller languages and based far from the centres of academic capital. I will present and compare two of them in this lecture. Eilert Sundt (1817–75) carried out systematic research on various aspects of everyday life in rural Norway in the mid 19th century, and is recognised as the first Norwegian social scientist. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, he wrote about controversial subjects such as extramarital sex and hygiene. Sundt, a contemporary of Comte and Marx, saw sociology and ethnology as tools for enlightened social policy. A century later, Gutorm Gjessing (1906–79), who held the Chair at the Ethnographic Museum, had comparable aims. Trained as an archaeologist, Gjessing published extensively on colonialism, inequality and environmental challenges, arguing that anthropology needed to take on urgent global challenges to remain relevant. Today, Sundt is revered but little read, while Gjessing virtually disappeared from the genealogy of anthropology in Norway. What they had in common was social engagement. This merits a reconsideration of their significance from the vantage-point of the Anthropocene.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, the History of Science Society (HSS) and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will not hold their planned in-person joint meeting this November in New Orleans, but will hold the joint meeting online, with a full schedule of talks, roundtables, social activities, prize ceremonies, a book exhibition, and more. It will take place from November 18 through November 21, 2021.

The HAR News editors would like to highlight several events on the program related to the history of anthropology. Please note that the event times given are in Central Time (U.S.). Registration for the meeting is required unless otherwise noted; a discounted rate is available for graduate students. Please note that events are subject to change and it is best to check the program regularly for the events you are interested in.

Thursday, November 18 12:00 – 1:00 PM CT

Redistribution and Reparation in the History of Science: an Open Listening Session

Where’s the money (and value and recognition)? We invite you to join an open listening session on redistributing scholarly resources to support early-career and underrepresented scholars and scholarship. We invite scholars who hold forms of academic capital, early career and underrepresented scholars, to talk about how we, as a Society and as a field, allocate value and resources. Where is value situated at different stages of the career, and where should it shift? What are scholars’ needs at different stages, places and positions? How can we think about redistribution and reparation in the history of science? This session is co-sponsored by Isis, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Forum for the History of the Human Sciences, Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and Graduate and Early Career Council.

Please note: Unlike other sessions on the program, this session is open to all, even those who have not registered for the annual meeting. Please register separately for this session at this link.

Thursday, November 18 3:00 – 4:30 PM CT

FHHS Distinguished Lecture and Business Meeting

Please join us for the Forum for the History of Human Science (FHHS) business meeting.  We welcome any scholar with interests in the history of the human sciences, broadly defined, and we look forward to seeing familiar faces and new members. The meeting will include the presentation of awards and the FHHS Annual Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Alexandra Hui, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University, on “Functional music and affective spaces: 100 years of the human science of background music.”

Thursday, November 18 3:30 – 4:30 PM CT

Darwin, Evolution, and Beyond

Bartlomiej Swiatczak, University of Science and Technology of China: Darwin within the body: Early theories of somatic evolution and their eclipse (1881-1910)

Jan Baedke, Ruhr University Bochum: Endosymbiosis and the Nazis: Adolf Meyer-Abich’s work at the German-Dominican Tropical Research Institute

Arya Mohan, The English and Foreign Languages University: “To Be Esteemed by My Fellow Scientists”: Examining the “Professional Man’s” Rhetoric in the Origin of Species

Liv Grjebine, Harvard University: A Darwinian Murder: The Role of the Barré-Lebiez Affair in the Diffusion of Darwinism in 19th Century France

Theology, Eugenics, and Constructions of Science & Medicine

Branden McEuen, Wayne State University: Eugenics as Preventive Public Medicine in Michigan

Vincent Auffrey, IHPST, University of Toronto: “Pour l’amélioration de la race humaine”: The Reception of Eugenics in the French-Canadian Press, 1912-1921

Nathan Bossoh, UCL: Christian “universalism” and the non-Western “other”: science, religion and racial boundaries

Thursday, November 18 5:45 – 8:00 PM CT

Joint Opening Plenary and Land Acknowledgment: Environment, Infrastructure, and Social Justice: Public Engagement in Historical and Multidisciplinary Research

Organizer and Chair: Gabrielle Hecht (Stanford University); Panelists: Alesia Montgomery (Stanford University Libraries), Jason Ludwig (Cornell University, Department of Science and Technology Studies), Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Lisa Onaga (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Friday, November 19 9:00 – 10:00 AM CT

Constructing/Deconstructing Race

Monica Libell, Lund University: Time and Culture in Carl Linnaeus’ Ethno-racial Classifications

Erica Torrens, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: The natural system and its relation to the process of racialisation in nineteenth-century Mexico through visual representation

Kelsey Henry, Yale University: “This milestone in their development as property”: Racially Stratified Child Development, 1820 – 1865 U.S.

Aparna Nair, University of Oklahoma-Norman: “Swadeshi” Spectacles, Eye Preservers and Dark Glasses: Race, Disability and Vision Aids in British India

Natural History Collections and Empire (1)

Lauren Williams, McGill University: The American Black Parrot: Exploring an 18th-century Paper Museum

Whitney Barlow Robles, Dartmouth College: The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Natural Science

Dr Charmantier, The Linnean Society of London: Empire and the Linnean Society Botany collections

Luciana Martins, Birkbeck, University of London: Resources of hope: reactivating Indigenous biocultural knowledge

Working Theories: The Human Sciences and Motivation to Labor in the Twentieth Century

Nima Bassiri, Duke University: Simulation, Industrial Labor, and Economic Pathologies circa 1900

Danielle Judith Carr, Columbia University: It made human life seem like the worst kind of wage labor”: Imagining the Motivation to Produce From Behaviorism’s Stimulus-Wage to Cognitivism’s Innate Creativity

Simon Torracinta, Yale University: Time, Labor, and Motivation in Midcentury Economics

Charles Petersen, Cornell University: The 100xr Road to Neoliberalism: Engineers, Meritocracy, and Economic Inequality, 1950-2000

Friday, November 19 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM CT

Natural History Collections and Empire (2)

Sofia Boanova Viegas, CIUHCT- FCUL, University of Lisbon; Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Porto: African Herbarium Collections: A Trigger to Uncover ‘Colonial Botany’ at University of Porto.

melanie boehi, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research: Revisiting empire in a Southern African plant collections

Chanelle Adams, University of Lausanne: Empirical Aims, Empire Gains: Knowledge regimes in the Madagascar herbarium collection at Marseille’s Colonial Institute

Martha Fleming, Natural History Museum of Denmark: Colonialities of the storeroom: provenance matters in natural history collections

Histories of Evolutionary Thinking about Social Things

Michael Pettit, York University: How Faces Became Special (When Maybe They are Not)

Tara Suri, Princeton: Security, Territory, Primate: Rhesus Monkeys and the Politics of Development in Postcolonial India

Cameron Brinitzer, University of Pennsylvania: Social Learning Mechanisms: The Evolution of Culture and Its Sciences

Joint Session: Building Race into the Machine: The Ongoing Challenges of “Big Data”

Erik Peterson, The University of Alabama: Afraid of the Dark: Making the First ‘Index of Nigrescence’ (1850s-1900)

Iris Clever, University of Chicago: Tracing race in forensic anthropological data practices: the case of Fordisc

Abigail Nieves Delgado, Utrecht University, Freudenthal Institute: Making race (ir)relevant: historical biases in facial recognition technologies

Catherine Stinson, Queen’s University, Kingston: The artifice of AI mindreading

Friday, November 19 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM CT

Racialized Knowledges: Epistemology, Difference, and Sciences Beyond the Western Teleologies

Sarah Qidwai, University of Toronto: De-centering the History of evolutionary thought and theories of origin in the nineteenth century

Patrícia Marcos, University of California San Diego: Racialized Knowledges: Manipulating Nature, Blackness, and Epistemic Disciplining in the Portuguese Inquisition.

Taylor Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara: Of Seashells and Sand: Racing and Erasing Superstition in Khedival Egypt

Friday, November 19 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM CT

Indigenous Peoples, Settler Science, and Social Justice

Kelly McDonough, University of Texas at Austin: Indigenous Scientific Knowledges and the Archive: Health, Illness, and Healing in the 1577 Relaciones geográficas

Charlotte Williams, University of Pennsylvania: The Many Roads to El Dorado: transportation infrastructures in archaeological extraction

Alexi Baker, Yale Peabody Museum: Instruments of Science and Social Justice: Uses for Historical Scientific Artifacts in Higher Education

Adam Johnson, SMU: Structure, Constraint, and Revelation in the Paper Tools of 19th Century American Ethnology

Saturday, November 20 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM CT

Research Methods in the Social Sciences

Tom Kayzel, Universiteit van Amsterdam: Early Economic Planning and the Double Experience of Modernity

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, Princeton University: The Production of Knowledge: A Path Not Taken

Christopher Rudeen, Harvard University: “Anthropology at Home”: The Domestic Methods of Mass-Observation

Matthew Hoffarth, Consortium for History of Science, Technology & Medicine: Interactions with the Rorschach: Anthony F.C. Wallace and Mel Spiro’s Criticisms of the Culture Concept

Science in East Asia between Global, Regional, and Local Perspectives: Power, Colonialism and Knowledge Production, 19th – 21st Century

Noa Nahmias, York University: The universe of science at your doorstep: popular science between national and global in China, 1933-1937

Rachel Wallner, Northwestern University: Making Hydrography Modern: Late-Qing Empire and Reforming Knowledge of the Southern Chinese Coast, 1886-1902

Haesoo Park, Singapore Management University: Postcolonial Science in Korea: Gendered Stem Cells and Technoscientific Sovereignty

Midori Kawaue, Princeton University: Japanese Anthropology and its Colonial Enterprise: A Case Study of the 1903 Human Pavilion

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in Spanish) on the transformations of a journal of paramount importance in the history of Spanish anthropology. 

Ortiz García, Carmen, 2021. “Metamorfosis antropológica (y política) de un proyecto editorial español: Una historia de la Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares” [Transl.: “Anthropological (and Political) Metamorphosis of a Spanish Journal: A History of the Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares“], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares (1944-) was created during the early years of the Franco regime, within the central body that controlled scientific research in Spain. The journal was intended as an organ for the dissemination of studies on traditional culture and folklore. Its publication has continued without interruption, going through different historical periods – from the dictatorship to the democratic transition. In 2018 the journal underwent its most radical change, with a re-foundation and the change of its former title to Disparidades. Revista de Antropología. In this ambitious article, Ortiz highlights the fact that the journal can be considered as a representative product of the successive periods through which anthropological research has passed in Spain. There have been discontinuities, but also tenuous lines of continuity within the institutional maintenance of a discipline which cannot be seen as separate from the ideological and political circumstances which have marked the history of Spain from the Republican era, the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and democracy.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: two articles (in French) on two major Americanist institutions in anthropology.

Laurière, Christine, 2021. “La construction d’une discipline. Histoire des congrès internationaux des américanistes (1875-1947)” [Transl.: “The construction of a discipline. History of the international congresses of Americanists (1875-1947)”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Laurière, Christine, 2021. “La Société des Américanistes de Paris (1895-) : ombres et lumières de l’américanisme français” [Transl.: “The Paris Society of Americanists (1895-): Shadows and Lights of French Americanism”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Organized for the first time in 1876 in Nancy, France, the International Congresses of Americanists have been a highlight for researchers studying the American continent. The congress crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1895 for a session in Mexico. Since then, it has been held alternately in Europe and America – first organized on a biennial basis and then, from 1976, every three years. For many decades, the congresses were dominated by the anthropological sciences, and dedicated exclusively to the continent’s first inhabitants, the Amerindians. The historical and scholarly specificities of the host nation were salient on each occasion, combined with international scientific considerations that made the congresses an unparalleled record of research trends. The faith in scientific internationalism and neutralism was jeopardized after WWI, when a group of scholars wanted to prevent German-speaking Americanists from participating. But Franz Boas, Paul Rivet, and Erland Nordenskiöld worked hand-in-hand to thwart such an attempt. Against all odds, the 1924 congress in Gothenburg reunited the Americanist community and restored the cardinal value of internationalism, reinforcing the importance and legitimacy of the congress.

On Erland Nordenskiöld’s initiative, a strong symbolic gesture was created with a photograph of the French Paul Rivet shaking hands with the German Karl von den Steinen – a close friend of Franz Boas – on the front page of a Gothenburg daily newspaper. In her unexpected article, Laurière concludes that neither WWI nor WWII broke the Americanist momentum. Since the 1980s, the definition of Americanism has broadened considerably to include sociology, history, educational sciences, political science, and applied anthropology. There has been a profound transformation of Americanist practice, with an unprecedented expansion of universities and research in South America, enhancing the dialogue between scholars from the center and the periphery who cooperate in international projects. The second article by Laurière further explores the European (particularly French) side of the coin, by unravelling the history of the Société des Américanistes de Paris, founded in 1895 by Ernest-Théodore Hamy. This learned society has published the Journal de la Société des Américanistes since 1896, bringing together researchers in various anthropological sciences: ethnologists and anthropologists, linguists and philologists, archaeologists and prehistorians. After Hamy’s death in 1908, Paul Rivet played an essential role in the development and international influence of the Société and its journal for half a century. It was the first learned society in the world to claim to be Americanist, but Laurière reveals its worldwide connections.

Dates: August 22-24, 2022

Location: University of Oxford (hybrid: online and in person)

Language: Chinese and English

Organizers: Anke Hein (University of Oxford) & Julia Lovell (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Steering Committee and Discussants: Chen Xingcan, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Rowan Flad, Ye Wa

As proclaimed recently in the Washington Post, this is a golden age for Chinese archaeology. Major recent discoveries such as the new object pits at Sanxingdui receive extensive press coverage in China and to a lesser extent abroad, and articles reporting archaeological research in China are becoming increasingly common in scholarly journals around the world. Yet, these English-language articles represent only a tiny proportion of the archaeological work that is done in China and much of the archaeological process behind it is unknown to foreigners. Few outside specialist circles are aware that China is currently celebrating 100 years of Chinese archaeology, and with an investment of time, money, and media coverage that archaeologists in other countries can only dream of. It is thus clear that archaeology is of great importance in China, promoted by the government and followed eagerly by the public; this phenomenon needs to be better understood outside China.

This call for papers invites contributions for a workshop to prepare an edited volume on the topic “The History and Practice of Archaeology in China,” which aims to promote better understanding of the way archaeology is practiced in China, and of the history of the discipline. The organizers welcome papers including but not limited to the following areas: the precursors to and history of modern Chinese archaeology; the development of influential theories and methods; studies of key institutions and influential excavations; analysis of the sociology and technologies of archaeology in China, including gendered experiences of fieldwork; the interactions between specialist academic and public archaeology, including treatment of archaeological discoveries in museums and media.

If you are interested in participating in this endeavor, please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a biographical note (50-100 words) to Anke Hein (anke.hein@arch.ox.ac.uk) and Julia Lovell (ubra235@mail.bbk.ac.uk). The deadline for submission of abstracts is December 3, 2021 and submissions will be reviewed by mid-January 2022.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in French) on the intersections between the history of the Native American Church and the history of anthropology from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Grillot, Thomas, 2021.  “La Native American Church, l’anthropologie états-unienne et le peyote” [Transl. “The Native American Church, Anthropology in the United States and Peyote”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The Native American Church (NAC) is an example of a co-creation involving anthropologists and the peoples they study. Incorporating in its rituals the consumption of a hallucinogen of Mexican origin, peyote, the NAC offers a privileged point of view on a little-known aspect of anthropological work: the contribution of some of the representatives of the discipline to the crossing or reinforcement of borders. This issue is addressed through an analysis of expert testimony, defending peyote consumption as a religious right of Native American tribal communities. James Mooney (1861-1921) played a founding role in the development of this professional tradition of testimony that contributes as much to legitimizing a practice as to setting its standards. A second generation took over in the 1930s. After the Second World War, it played the role of gatekeeper, when consumption extended beyond the members of the NAC and a small circle of American and European elites.

The great popularity of Carlos Castaneda (1925-1998)’s writings marks a turning point in this respect. While they shed light on the existence of other practices of peyote consumption across the U.S.-Mexico border, the controversy that soon surrounded them also tainted this openness with a suspicion of fraud. The consumption of peyote was largely enshrined in the various laws protecting the freedom of worship of Native American populations in the United States between the 1970s and 1990s, but strictly reserved for the NAC. It is then as a distinct and essentially American tradition that the rituals of this church come to irrigate a trans-American Amerindian spirituality in selected sites in Mexico. This surprising article by Grillot traces the history of the NAC and its crossings with the history of anthropology.

The Forum for History of Human Science (FHHS), an Interest Group within the History of Science Society (HSS), promotes interest in the history of such disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and statistics, as well as of related issues in medicine, education, politics, and the law.

FHHS is governed by a steering committee of seven officers elected during a business meeting held in conjunction with the annual meeting of HSS. Nominations for each position are open, and neither nominees nor office-holders need be members of HSS. FHHS positions are for two years. This year (2021), our open positions are Vice-Elect, Treasurer, Representative and Graduate Representative.

FHHS is now accepting nominations for open positions for the next two-year term. Please submit nominations or self-nominations here by November 1, 2021. The current open positions are:

Vice-Elect
FHHS Chairs lead the Steering Committee and, as a result, the Forum. They are responsible for running the annual business meeting, setting the agenda and priorities, and coordinating all the Forum’s other activities over the course of the year. The Vice-Elect assists the Chair(s) in the first year of service, and becomes Chair (or Co-Chair) the following year. Chairs may serve two terms.

Treasurer
FHHS Treasurer sees to the (modest) budget, including by recruiting and retaining members, coordinating with other officers around issues like prize money and honoraria, and providing an overall picture of the health of the organization at the annual business meeting.

Representative and Graduate Student Representative
FHHS Representatives (#1, #2 and #3) are responsible for specific issues within the Forum. One representative is a “Graduate Representative” and takes the lead on recruiting new members; another takes the lead on organizing and staffing committees for our two prizes (Article and Early-Career); a third aids the co-chairs in organizing the Distinguished Lecture and Sponsored Session at HSS.

Editor’s Note: With sadness, the History of Anthropology Review notes the death of Ira Jacknis, research anthropologist at the Hearst Museum at Berkeley. He was a valued contributor to this publication and a supportive member of our Advisory Board. Ira reflected on his own career and current projects as part of changing interests in the history of anthropology for HAR’s online relaunch in 2016; his essay, “Doing the History of Anthropology as the History of Visual Representation” is available here.

We are grateful to Ira’s longtime collaborator, Professor Regna Darnell, for the following reminiscence.

I have known Ira Jacknis since he was a graduate student. Our work intersected in multiple contexts and locations. Ira and I shared interdisciplinary interests in Native Americans, collaborative research, objects, museums as sites of interpretation and contemporary engagement, public education, audiences among multiple publics, and the history of anthropology. Ira’s integration of these topics appeared seamless because it grew out of personal experience rather than grand theoretical models in a vacuum. 

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico is currently seeking applications for the William Y. and Nettie K. Adams Fund. This fellowship offers funding for short campus seminars or summer research projects focused on the history of anthropology and the theoretical implications of the culture concept. The Adams Fund selection process is guided by the School’s longstanding commitment to support research that advances knowledge about human culture, evolution, history, and creative expression. This year, in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Indian Arts Fund collection which we hold on our campus, SAR would be particularly interested in proposals which critically reexamine the “salvage” anthropology era of the early 20th century.

Individual Projects:

Scholars with summer research projects that meet the requirements of the Adams Fund are eligible for $500 in travel support and up to $2000 in stipend support, depending on the length of their visit. On a space-available basis, campus housing may be provided for a nominal cost.

Short Seminars:

Seminar proposals meeting the requirements of the Adams Fund will receive three days of lodging and meals for up to ten participants at SAR’s Schwartz Seminar House. Travel costs to/from Santa Fe are not covered for short seminars.

How to Apply:

Applicants whose projects meet the terms of the Adams Fund should send a letter of inquiry and a brief project proposal to Paul Ryer (ryer@sarsf.org), Director of Scholar Programs, School for Advanced Research. Any questions about the application process or the Fund should also be directed to Paul Ryer. There is no application deadline; applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis.

History of the Human Sciences– the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

The Library & Museum of the American Philosophical Society seeks to hire an Engagement Coordinator for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) and Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR). This position will assist in implementing the Native American Scholars Initiative by developing and executing innovative programs at the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research as well as providing mentorship for fellows and interns; work with Native American communities and community-based scholars to provide access to the Library & Museum’s Indigenous-related collections from reference request onward; as well as cultivate new and steward existing partnerships.

Applications are now open for a Postdoctoral Fellowship on a Wellcome Trust-funded research project on Maps of Malignancy in Sub-Saharan Africa at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s College London.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Research Associate) in Maps of Malignancy

Closing date: 25 October 2021

​​​​​​The Department of Global Health & Social Medicine is seeking a Research Associate to work as part of a research team on a research project entitled “Maps of Malignancy: Epidemiologists and Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, the project aims to shed light on epidemiological efforts to map cancer in Africa over the last 70 years. Specifically, drawing on insights from postcolonial science studies, the project examines the socio-technical infrastructures and political rationales that underpin these mapping efforts as well as the understandings of cancer and Africa that they bring into being. To address these issues, the project uses a combination of ethnographic and archival research methods to examine two cartographic efforts: (1) the research on cancer aetiology carried out by British and French doctors in Africa in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods to improve treatment strategies at home; and (2) the contemporary global surveillance initiatives seeking to measure the cancer burden in Africa in order to rationalise health policy and planning on the continent. The research project builds on and expands an earlier British Academy-funded pilot project on Cartographies of Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in French on Julius Lips, the German anthropologist exiled to the U.S. after fleeing Nazi Germany with his wife Eva.

Villar, Diego, 2021. “Julius Lips, précurseur de l’anthropologie inversée” [Transl. “Julius Lips, Forerunner of Reverse Anthropology”], in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Julius Lips (1895-1950) was a German ethnologist trained under the diffusionist school who studied material culture and non-Western art from a comparative perspective. Professor at the University of Cologne (1929-1933) and director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (1928-1933), he organized controversial exhibitions together with his wife Eva Wiegandt (1906-1988), such as Masken der Menschen (The Masks of Men) in which African ritual masks rubbed shoulders with expressionist paintings, Melanesian skulls, and the death masks of Beethoven and Napoleon. Accused of subversive relativism, he left Germany one year after Hitler’s rise to power and went into exile in the United States. He was supported by Franz Boas at Columbia University (1934-1936) and was a visiting professor at Howard University (1937-1939).

In North America, Lips consolidated his professional career, carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Algonquian-speaking communities, and published – in 1937 – his most important anthropological contribution: The Savage Hits Back, or the White Man through Native Eyes, with a preface by none other than Bronislaw Malinowski. Villar’s article reviews the trajectory of Lips before and after WWII and pays special attention to the collection of ethnographic objects and pictures gathered by Lips in The Savage Hits Back to document the ways in which “savage art” represented the “White man.” While unveiling the ambiguities of his work, Villar considers that Lips anticipates “reverse anthropology,” namely the Indigenous capacity to objectify foreign observers. In 1948, Lips returned to Germany (GDR) where he wanted to promote an ethnology compatible with socialism. He directed the Institute of Ethnology, founded the Institute of Comparative Legal Sociology, and became rector of Leipzig University in 1949. He died in 1950, but Eva Lips continued his work and defended his/their anthropological legacy to the end.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in English on the career of Alexander Goldenweiser. 

Kan, Sergei, 2021. “An Unorthodox Boasian: Life and Work of Alexander Goldenweiser,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

In the annals of the history of anthropology, Alexander Goldenweiser (1880-1940) usually occupies a less prominent place than his fellow Boasians. His academic career suffered from his own difficult personality and erratic behavior, and for this reason, plus the fact that quite a few of his writings appeared in non-anthropological journals, he receives little attention. In this important article, Kan sustains that a careful reading of the entire corpus of Goldenweiser’s work reveals the brilliant mind of a highly erudite scholar. Usually identified as the author of a seminal work on totemism, which offered a thorough criticism of this concept as developed by late nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropologists, Goldenweiser also introduced such important notions as “the limited possibility in the development of culture” and “cultural involution.” Moreover, along with Edward Sapir and Paul Radin, he insisted on the key role of the individual in culture and promoted a rapprochement between anthropology and psychology. Finally, he was also a strong advocate of an interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences, combining anthropological with historical, psychological, and sociological interpretations of culture history. 

Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev (Ukraine, Russian Empire) into a Russian Jewish family. He studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University, where he taught until 1919. He did fieldwork among the Iroquois, but Kan reveals that he dedicated himself mostly to anthropological theory and had an important role as a progressive public intellectual. His work includes one of earliest textbooks in anthropology in the U.S., Early Civilization: An Introduction to Primitive Culture (1937), a popular book called Robots and Gods: An Essay on Craft and Mind (1931), as well as a collection of essays, History, Psychology and Culture (1933).

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in English on Cora Du Bois by her biographer, Susan Seymour.

Seymour, Susan C., 2021. “A 20th Century American Anthropologist and ‘First Woman’: The Life and Work of Cora Du Bois,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Cora Du Bois (1903-1991) was an American anthropologist whose life spanned much of the twentieth century and whose professional career reflects major developments in the history of that discipline. In addition, Du Bois was a twentieth-century “first woman,” one of the few women of her generation to succeed in having a career that included both university teaching and research but also government service. During World War II, Du Bois served as a high-ranking intelligence officer and then as a Southeast Asia specialist in the State Department in Washington, D.C. Her prominence as an anthropologist was established during the 1930s when she did groundbreaking research in culture and personality. In 1954, Du Bois was appointed the Zemurray-Stone Radcliffe professor of anthropology and social relations at Harvard University, the university’s first tenured woman in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In this seminal article by Du Bois’s biographer, Seymour concludes that Du Bois’s “intense intellect, curiosity, and formidable character had propelled her through a series of unprecedented accomplishments in both government service and academe,” as she moved from “salvage” anthropology to pioneering research in culture and personality, and then to a new form of research on a complex society through time, using an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach.