Editorial Note: July 2024

Dear HAR readers: 

Here is a quick midsummer note on recent activity in our online journal. 

Recently: Over the past few months we’ve been serially publishing entries in a Special Focus Section on “Histories of Ethnoscience,” guest edited by Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille and Harriet Mercer. We invite you to peruse what is now a substantial and diverse collection of perspectives on an important field whose history has received far too little attention.  

Now: This week we’re publishing another exciting collection of essays, a round-table discussion of Bernard Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, which places mid-century anthropology at the center of the “cybernetic apparatus”– where the technosciences of communication, major institutional funding strategies, colonial legacies and imperial ambitions all overlap– revealing a crucial hidden history of humanist research in the digital age. Scholars from anthropology, sociology, and history of science answered the same three questions about the book: we present their essays both as stand-alone pieces, and clustered as “round table” replies to each question, followed by the author’s response.

Soon: Some of these threads will be picked up in an exchange which we will publish later this summer between anthropologist Philippe Descola and philosopher of the social sciences Bruno Karsenti. “Anthropology and Philosophy” reflects on the epistemology of structuralism, its precursors and inheritors, and on anthropology’s current philosophical centrality. 

Many thanks to all of these authors, coming from so many different fields, nations, and specialties.

And a particular thanks to our editorial teams for all their work to realize these collections– for “Ethnosciences,” Field Notes, led by Rosanna Dent and Cameron Brinitzer, and for “Code,” Reviews editors Allegra Giovine and Michael Edwards. 

And thanks to all of you, for reading and contributing to HAR!