John Tresch and Richard Handler, guest editors

Anthropology’s intense concern with its own past stands out among the social sciences. After a quick review of current literature, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and even historians can jump right into their presentation of new findings. But few anthropologists writing about the contemporary world do so without at least an acknowledgement, and often a careful reckoning, of how anthropology’s previous theoretical frames and (geo-) political position continue to shape current anthropological work on the issues at hand.

In-depth study of the histories of anthropology adds detail and complexity to these briefer acknowledgements. Careful, contextual, polyphonic history reveals hidden contradictions and ambiguities; it can highlight the complicities of canonized figures and movements; it might produce an unwanted empathy for actors and developments we were inclined to condemn. Moreover, historical researchers focused on anthropology—or anthropologists focused on history—can often be deliberate and explicit about the ways in which their archival research, oral history, and hermeneutic reconstruction addresses and engages with current concerns.

This Special Focus Section is the result of a series of panels held in the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” hosted online between 4 and 7 December, 2023. This conference—a landmark for history of anthropology, with nearly 100 presentations from scholars around the world—was organized by the history of anthropology network [HOAN].

Our call for papers asked: “What light can the history of anthropology shed on issues of current anthropological concern, through revisiting the field’s earlier moments?” We offered a few suggestions:

For example, speakers might consider how past anthropologists’ positions within and at times opposed to imperial and colonial projects can shed light on contemporary politics of Indigeneity, the global distribution of suffering, or relations between researchers and their interlocutors. Or historians looking at anthropology’s role in forming 19th-century race science and debunking it in the 20th century might consider how their work speaks to current ethnographers who are working on mass incarceration, militarized policing, or the reappearance of eugenics in big-data collection and surveillance—or vice versa. Perhaps anthropologists concentrating on the politics and practices of the environment might point out the ways earlier attention to the interactions between environments and cultures (for example in 19th-century geography, or in 20th-century ethnoscience or cultural ecology) offers useful perspectives on the present.

The response was large and inspiring. The final list of titles for our three panels is here; several other excellent proposals found a place on other panels. At our invitation, a handful of speakers revised their work for publication in HAR. We’re delighted to publish them here. United by the question of how recovering the past can meet current questions, these essays give a tantalizing sense of the temporal, geographic, and thematic range and excitement of the conference and the discussions it generated.

Csaba Mészáros spells out how Hungarian anthropology has been obsessed not with Otherness but Sameness, going back to the late 19th century. Hungarian anthropologists sought out Asian groups who spoke related languages, and presented them as suggesting ways to a more authentic Hungarian form of life or nation in the future. This representational scheme remains active and underexamined in Hungarian anthropology now.

Samuel Collins returns to the landmark Macy Conferences, but suggests a new story about early cybernetics. Rather than see the conference’s nascent cybernetic and information-science approaches—cutting across anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, biology, and engineering—as a unified discourse, he considers the discussions as a polyglot encounter rife with partial alignments, whose misunderstandings point beyond today’s grim sense of digital hegemony.

Grounded in his work on the history of anthropology in India and Germany, Thiago Barbosa’s essay contends with the “defensive … historiography” that some anthropologists have offered in response to recurring critiques of the discipline’s “entanglement with colonialism and racism.” He advocates a “critical presentism”—avoiding “moralizing assessments” of historical actors while recognizing the contingency of contemporary scientific standards—and a “topological” attention to the non-linear ways knowledge circulates, as in the instruments designed in the 19th century to measure race that are still in use today, in India, to measure caste.

A remarkable four-person piece by Qwa7yán’ak (Carl Alexander), Qwalqwalten (Garry John), Rep’rep’sken (Morris Prosser), and Sarah C. Moritz looks at the work of Boas’s collaborator James Teit with the St’át’imc people in British Columbia. The authors describe Teit’s careful work in translating and recording the 1911 Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe; the engaged efforts of this “good anthropologist” resulted in a political and spiritual document of Indigenous land rights which has endured for over a century, setting an important precedent for today.

Finally, HAR editor Michael Edwards takes us back to the 1990s, juxtaposing framings of multiculturalism by the Australian government and media with work of anthropologists at that time, critically attuned to the ways in which recognition of cultural difference falls short of empowerment and inclusion. A memorable TV channel’s “world music” theme song leads him to reflect on how the movement of imagery and people was both celebrated and restricted, in ways that rhyme with contemporary acts of symbolic and military violence.

Our colleagues at BEROSE International Encylopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology have also just published a series of six essays based on talks at the HOAN conference, from the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives,” organized by David Shankland, Christine Laurière, and Frederico Delgado Rosa. You might start with Richard Kuba on Frobenius in Australia; links to each essay are found at the end of this announcement.

The editors would like to thank all the authors, the participants in these panels, and the organizers of the HOAN conference, in particular Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Hande Birkalan-Gedik, for their work ensuring the future of the history of anthropology.

Table of Contents

Authors
John Tresch: contributions / website / treschj@gmail.com / Warburg Institute, University of London
Richard Handler: contributions / rh3y@eservices.virginia.edu