History of Anthropology

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.

 
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.