History of Anthropology

Please join us for a discussion about an overlooked moment in the history of anthropological engagements with American Indian activism with Grant Arndt, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University. Alongside a working draft of Arndt’s latest article, we will read and discuss related pieces from Nancy Lurie and Vine Deloria Jr.  
 
Readings: 

• Grant Arndt. “Joining the Ongoing Struggle: Vine Deloria, Nancy Lurie, and the Quest for a Decolonial Anthropology.” [Working Draft] 
• Vine Deloria Jr. "Anthropologists and Other Friends" from Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto   
• Nancy Oestreich Lurie. "As Others See Us" from New University Thought. 
• Nancy Oestreich Lurie. "Action Anthropology and the American Indian" from Anthropology and the American Indian: Report of a Symposium. 

 
Thin Description: A Conversation with John L. Jackson Jr.
 
Please join us for a discussion about the politics and poetics of ethnography, past and present, with John L. Jackson, Jr., Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania https://anthropology.sas.upenn.edu/people/john-l-jr-jackson
 
Main Readings (included as PDF):

• John L. Jackson, Jr., Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Harvard University Press, 2013. Chapters 1-4 and 20 ("Thin") (1-38, 149-155)
• Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," 1973, 14 pp.
• John L. Jackson, Jr. "Bewitched by Boas," 18-22, in Hau- Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 3 (2017): 18-22.

 
Additional readings (also included as PDF):

• Jackson, Thin Description, Chapter 5, "Chicago."

• The rest of the special section of Hau which contains "Why do we read the classics?" with pieces by Fred Myers, Anastasia Piliavsky, Yarimar Bonilla, Adia Benton, and Paul Stoller. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 3 (2017): 1-38.

 
A discussion with Anand Pandian, Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, on relations between current anthropological practice and the discipline's history.
 
Readings:
 
-Anand Pandian, "A Method of Experience: Reading, Writing, Teaching, Fieldwork," pp.44-76, in A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (Duke, 2019). Attached below.
 
-Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques (John and Doreen Weightman, trans., NY, Atheneum, 1975): "The Quest for Power" (37-45); and "The Making of an Anthropologist" (51-61), Scanned in zip file below; full text of Tristes Tropiques is available here for borrowing.
 
NOTE: this session will end fifteen minutes earlier than usual (1:15 pm EST) to allow for Professor Pandian's teaching schedule.

 
Multi-Species Anthropology: An Open Discussion
This session will discuss excerpts from two recent works of "multispecies anthropology": Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), and Radhika Govindrajan's Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas (2018).
 
These books have been much discussed among anthropologists and historians of science (and "the human" sciences); they mark an intriguing turn in anthropology toward ethnography beyond the human.
 
In our planning for this session, other candidates were raised for discussion--  including Donna Haraway on primates and companions, Gergory Bateson on cats, wolves, and octopi, Japanese primatology, Konrad Lorenz, Marisol de la Cadena, Stefan Helmreich, Tim Ingold,Geof Bil and Harold Conklin on Ethnobotany,  Marcy Norton on chickens and Quetzal, Rousseau on orangoutans-- and many more.
 
We look forward to discussing these two texts informally, while asking how to situate multispecies ethnography within the longer history of anthropology.
 
Readings:
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World:On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), vii-9
Radhika Govindrajan's Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas (2018), Chapter 2, 31-61; (and optional: Chapt 3, 91-118; Chapt 5, 119-145).
Looking forward to seeing you there.

 
This month's session will not have any 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 taking place this month.
 
They'll have the chance to share their work, discuss the conference reactions, and reflect on the state of History of Anthropology as shown in these two (zoom-heavy) conferences.
 
We will hear from Patricia Martins Marcos, Tracie Canada, Nick Barron, and Cameron Brinitzer, members of our editorial board and longstanding participants in the working group. Titles will be added soon.
 
PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE
Patricia Martins Marcos: Racialized Knowledges: Manipulating Nature, Blackness, and Epistemic Disciplining in the Portuguese Inquisition.
Tracie Canada: From panel: 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.
Others TBA
 
Please join us December 1st for a lively and multi-faceted conversation!

This session, led by Elizabeth Ferry and Les Field, will consider past and present perspectives in the anthropology of value with special attention paid to the study of gold. Please find the list of readings below and all readings either hyperlinked or in the zip file. 
  
Main Readings: 

• Ferry, Elizabeth. 2016. “On Not Being a Sign: Gold’s Semiotic Claims.” Signs and Society 4 (1): 57–79.
• Field, Les W. 2019. “Gold, Ontological Difference, and Object Agency.” In The Anthropology of Precious Minerals, edited by Andrew Walsh, Annabel Vallard, and Elizabeth Ferry, 164–88. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Graeber, David. 1996. “Beads and Money: Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power.” American Ethnologist 23 (1): 4–24.

 
Session 7: "Visualization"
 
This session, led by Abigail Nieves Delgado and Iris Clever, will take a broad view of visualization from the 18th to 20th centuries across a range of traditions. Please find the list of readings below and all readings either hyperlinked or in the zip file.
 
Main Readings:

• Keevak, Michael. 2011. “Taxonomies of Yellow: Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the Making of a ‘Mongolian’ Race in the Eighteenth Century.” In Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton University Press.
• Qureshi, Sadiah. 2012. "Peopling the landscape: Showmen, displayed peoples and travel illustration in nineteenth-century Britain." Early Popular Visual Culture 10(1): 23-36.
• Evans, Andrew. 2020. “‘Most Unusual’ Beauty Contests: Nordic Photographic Competitions and the Construction of a Public for German Race Science, 1926–1935,” Isis 111(2): 289-309.
• Stinson, Catherine. 2020. “Algorithms Associating Appearance and Criminality Have a Dark Past.” Aeon, May 15, 2020. https://aeon.co/ideas/algorithms-associating-appearance-and-criminality-....

 
Additional Readings

• Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3–64.

 
Session 8: "Data futures"
The discussion will be led by Taylor M. Moore.
 
Main Readings

• Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons, "Introduction: The New Jim Code," 1-25
• Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press,Chapter 3, "Branding Blackness: Biometric Technology and the Surveillance of Blackness,"  89-129.
• Dryer, Theodora, 2019. "The New Critical History of Surveillance and Human Data." Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2019): 556-565.
• Karen Hao, "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says." MIT Technology Review, Dec 2, 2020.

 
Additional Readings

• Roberts, Dorothy, interview with "Reimagining Race, Resistance, and Technoscience." In Captivating Technology, pp. 328-348. Duke University Press, 2019 (included)
• Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, and Brit Rusert, eds. 2018. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press (included)
• Hanna, Alex, Emily Denton, Andrew Smart, and Jamila Smith-Loud. 2019. “Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness.” , ArXiv:1912.03593 [Cs].
• Lemov, Rebecca. 2017. “Anthropology’s Most Documented Man, Ca. 1947: A Prefiguration of Big Data from the Big Social Science Era.” Osiris 32 (1): 21–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/694171.
• Müller-Wille, Staffan. 2018. “Making and Unmaking Populations.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48 (5): 604–15. https://doi.org/10/gg4vhs

 
Session 6: "Policing and Applied/Public Anthropology"
 
Main Readings

• Singer, Merrill. 2000. “Why I Am Not a Public Anthropologist.” Anthropology News 41 (6): 6–7. https://doi.org/10/c74n99.
• Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 143–56, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13357.
• Smith, Christen A. 2015. “Blackness, Citizenship, and the Transnational Vertigo of Violence in the Americas.” American Anthropologist 117 (2): 384–87. https://doi.org/10/gg4vhm.
• Ralph, Laurence. 2020. "Black Cargo." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(2): 269-278. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/710167

 
Additional Readings

• Scannell, R. Joshua. 2019. “This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 107–29. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478004493-007.
• French, Jan Hoffman. 2013. “Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race.” Latin American Politics and Society 55 (4): 161–81. https://doi.org/10/f5mbd8.
• Karpiak, Kevin. 2016. “No Longer Merely ‘Good to Think’: The New Anthropology of Police as a Mode of Critical Thought:” Theoretical Criminology, November. https://doi.org/10/gg4vhk.
• *Mutsaers, Paul, Jennie Simpson, and Kevin Karpiak. 2015. “The Anthropology of Police as Public Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 117 (4): 786–89. https://doi.org/10/gg4vhn.

 
Session 5: "Racism in science"
 
How does racism shape science? How has anthropology (biological and cultural) contributed to Western/European self-definitions as rational, scientifcally progressive-- and white? How do we reckon withthe fact that biologists have long claimed to recognize the abritrary, constructed nature of race, while racial categories remain central to much biological research, and remain profoundly consequential in everyday life and politics? How do race and racism-- including "eugenic scripts" (Subramaniam)-- continue to inform scientific training, careers, and content, in biology, chemistry, and environmental justice?
 
In addition to discussing readings by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ann Morning, and Michelle Murphy (50 pages total), we want to signal last week's appointment of Alondra Nelson as "STS Czar" (or, officially, Deputy Director of the the Office of Science and Technology Policy for Science and Society) with a news clip on the announcement and brief essays in response to her book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. The discussion will be facilitated by John Tresch.
 
Main readings (provided in zipfile):

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. "Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness." In Global Transformations, pp. 7-28 (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
• Morning, Ann. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (California: University of California Press, 2011); Chapter 7, "Conclusion" 219-248.
• Murphy, Michelle. "Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations." Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 494–503.
• https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/biden-picks-alondra-nelson-deputy-science-policy-chief-75299191

 
Additional readings:

• Subramaniam, Banu. n.d. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity-- Introduction, 1-24 (in zipfile).
• Book Forum on Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA, Somatosphere: http://somatosphere.net/2018/book-forum-alondra-nelson.html.
• Benjamin, Ruha. 2017. “Cultura Obscura: Race, Power, and ‘Culture Talk’ in the Health Sciences.” American Journal of Law & Medicine, December. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0098858817723661.
• Manning, Kenneth R. 1983. Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. New York: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/black-apollo-of-science-9780195034981.
• Marks, Jonathan. 2017. Is Science Racist? Malden, MA: Polity Press. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745689210.