History of Anthropology

 
Cameron Brinitzer, a USC-Berggruen Fellow at the University of Southern California Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, joins us to discuss his article-in-progress: “The Evolution of Culture: Materializing an Elusive Concept.”  

Abstract: In the 1970s and 1980s, at the very moment that many cultural anthropologists were abandoning the concept of culture in light of feminist, literary, and postcolonial critiques, and searching for new epistemic objects to orient anthropological inquiries, an array of life, mind, and behavioral scientists began to center concepts of culture in novel research programs. This essay traces how culture—long renowned for its imponderability and as something that one could only understand or interpret through sustained periods of embodied immersion in the field—has in recent decades been transformed into an object of experimental knowledge production in mind and life science laboratories. While focusing on the work of one influential European research group in the field of "Cultural Evolution" that is institutionally located at the Central European University, this essay also examines how concepts of culture have been turned into objects of reflection and intervention by governmental actors in recent decades. In light of these consequential ways in which concepts of culture continue to orchestrate human activities across a range of political, social, and scientific domains, I argue that anthropologists and historians of anthropology are well positioned to examine how culture is conceptualized in different contexts today and how these concepts are given material forms and force. 
 
Discussants:
Joanna Radin, Yale University
Rosanna Dent, NJIT

For our first meeting of 2023,  Matteo Bortolini from the Università di Padova, Italy will join us for discussion of his work-in-progress:
“'A Twenty-Four Hour Job': Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s First Foray into the Field and the Scholarly Persona of the Anthropologist”
 
With its rich funding, focus on post-colonial societies, teamwork and interdisciplinarity aimed at producing “dual” results, Cold War American anthropology represented a departure from both Boasian methodology and the Malinowskian palimpsest of the conditions for producing the “ethnographer’s magic.” This paper presents a historical reconstruction of the early days of Clifford and Hildred Geertz as members of the Modjokuto Project in order to reflexively tackle a number of problems regarding the history of social and cultural anthropology: How do social scientist come to understand their professional role and the specific scientific virtues attached to it? How are scholalrly personae and other regulative templates put to the test (and modified) during fieldwork? How does the lack of methodological reflection on the ways of the anthropologist impact on the completion of specific research projects? The article details how Hildred and Clifford Geertz embodied in their actions and decisions the Malinowskian image of the lonely ethnographer, thus creating a series of performative contradictions between their extremely individualistic understanding of the ethnographer and the needs of teamwork in the field.
We are happy to host Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) and Matt Watson (Mount Holyoak) as discussants.

Ali Sipahi joins us from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Özyeğin University, Istanbul, to workshop his paper, "How to be a good guest? American ethnographers in Cold War Turkey."
 
Abstract: The article uncovers a chapter in the history of American anthropology by revealing the experiences of a Chicago-based group of ethnographers in Turkey in the late 1960s. Using original archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on the trials of Lloyd A. Fallers, Michael Meeker, Peter Benedict and June Starr in navigating Turkish bureaucracy and global politics between 1967 and 1969 (the so-called ‘long 1968’). Conceptually, the article calls for complementary collaboration between the scholarly literature on Cold War anthropology and critical hospitality studies. It argues that while the former dedicated its “evil slot” (to paraphrase Trouillot) to an undifferentiated guest role, the hospitality literature did the same for the host role. The case of American anthropology of Turkey shows that the macropolitical and ideological effects of the Cold War were refracted through the diversity of local understandings of hospitality in varied, even opposite, directions.
 
Discussants: Elise Burton (University of Toronto) and Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)

Matthew C. Watson joins us from Mount Holyoke College to workshop a chapter from his new book project, tentatively titled The Whiteness of Method: Racial Infrastructures of Harvard Ethnography and Mexican Sovereignty.
 
"The Ethnographic Drive: Interviews and the Racial Erotics of a Harvard Land-Rover in Chiapas"
In 1951, Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. This essay stories the conjuncture of this state investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas and the attendant geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access “closed corporate communities” such as Zinacantán during the late-1950s and 1960s. I focus particularly on Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt’s early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land-Rover. Reading the Land-Rover as a space-making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of homosocial intimacy and attachment within a racial erotics of empiricism that renders the interview space a site of capitalist capture. Finally, through a cross-reading of mirror scenes reflecting encounters with Land-Rovers across the Harvard Chiapas Project and the Harvard Kalahari Project, I refract this critique of the interview form’s capitalist coloniality through a weak-theoretical evocation of the Land-Rover’s social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy.
 
Discussants: Hilary Morgan Leathem (Maynooth University);Karin Rosemblatt (University of Maryland)

Staffan Müller-Wille joins us from the University of Cambridge’s Department for History and Philosophy of Science to workshop his forthcoming paper, “Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the ‘Genealogical Method.’”
 
“Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the ‘Genealogical Method’”
Müller-Wille’s chapter recontextualizes the “genealogical method,” a way to map biological and social relations and processes, in late 19th century kinship studies. He presents this method as an important interface between the biological and sociological approaches to human inheritance, which are typically thought of as distinct, though they shared similar concepts of race, kinship, and blood. In this chapter, Müller-Wille examines classic works in the history of anthropology by Rivers, Francis Galton, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Franz Boas to explore the genealogical method’s role as an analytical tool.
 

Taylor M. Moore will join us from The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Department of History at University of California--Santa Barbara. We will workshop a chapter of her book manuscript in progress, Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt.
 
"Living Room Magic: Ritualistic Ethnography, Esoteric Intimacies"
 
This chapter uses the letters and field notes of British anthropologist Winifred Blackman to argue that British anthropology was an occult science. The chapter turns to the gendered, domestic space of the living room to show how Egyptian wise women contributed to the development of global anthropology and folklore studies during the interwar period. It highlights two pivotal points in Blackman’s fieldwork—in the tomb-chapels of Meir in 1921 and her apartment in Shoubra—when the anthropologist was able to provide wise women and their patients with a private space to conduct their practice. Within these spaces, Blackman forged what I term “esoteric intimacies” with these women that facilitated her field work. They provided Blackman with an opportunity to observe and record these women’s work, codifying the previously unwritten wisdom of the old wives into ethnographic material. Yet, Blackman’s research method functioned much like an apprenticeship. Her ritualistic ethnography and access to sacred objects made her famous in many villages as a healer in her own right.  

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.