Announcing a Name Change: The History of Anthropology Review

In 2016 we relaunched this website as an online, collectively-edited update of the History of Anthropology Newsletter. We’re delighted to have celebrated our third birthday this summer. Our editorial collective has made the transition to a digital format, preserving not only HAN’s back issues (under the editorship of George Stocking and Henrika Kuklick) but, we believe, its goals and vision.

The site is serving as a regular channel for news of the discipline, including reviews (of books, conferences, and exhibits), essays, special issues (as with our recent dossiers on a landmark of Brazilian anthropology and on Canguilhem’s philosophy of the milieu), a record of recent and classic publications, plus tidbits from the archives in Clio’s Fancy (most recently, on the Dell Hymes-Gary Snyder correspondence). With the support of our Advisory Board and our remarkable contributors— coming from an enormous variety of nations, disciplines, and career stages—the site is helping to sustain the worldwide community of researchers exploring the vast range of topics and approaches that continue to reshape the history of anthropology.

Considering this expansion, and the ways in which people read, write, and organize today, we have felt that the name ‘Newsletter’ no longer quite fits what we do. We publish online nearly continuously, with considerably more new content than before. And while we welcome the radical associations of the term “newsletter”—as highlighted in Ira Bashkow’s past and recent essays on its meaning for Stocking— we no longer use a mimeograph or stapler, or aim primarily at a focused group of fellow travelers.

After much discussion, the editorial collective has decided to give the site a new name: History of Anthropology Review. This title strikes us as both modest and august. It emphasizes the importance for us and our readers of reviews of books, conferences, and exhibitions, while underlining our commitment to rethinking and re-evaluating the long and complex history, current trends, and future developments of both anthropology and its history. 

It strikes us that this new name (and its piratical abbreviation, HAR) keeps our aims and accomplishments intact. We hope, further, that it will encourage even more scholars to contribute to a publication that is not only a timely and relevant messenger for a discrete community, but an enduring, widely-accessible historical document in its own right.

We will make this change official later this month, in October 2019; our web address and other contact information will remain the same, and issues of HAR will simply be joined to those of HAN.   

As always, we warmly welcome contributions: in the forms of reviews, announcements, suggestions for articles, special issues, or archival finds (please write to the editors of each of the website’s departments with your suggestions or inquiries), and encourage you to continue to spread the word to potential contributors and subscribers. We also warmly thank all our authors, advisors, and readers—and look forward with great excitement to the future development of the field and of the History of Anthropology Review.