History of Anthropology

Charlotte Williams (University of California, Berkeley), "'Panamania' in Zonian Life: American Identity Through Archaeology’s Social Lives in the US-Panama Canal Zone (1940-1970)"

From 1903 to 1979, the United States operated the Panama Canal Zone as ostensibly a sovereign entity. Developing housing, offices, schools, and a police force to govern this area, the United States created the imperial conditions for a new identity of American citizens to emerge—referring to themselves as “Zonians” Americans in Panamá lived in a state within a state, defined by different access to resources, liberties, and ways of building and maintaining their heritage. Among the many clubs and societies established within the zone included an amateur archaeology group, called the Archaeological Society of Panamá. In operation from 1948-1969, this group conducted excavations both within and outside of the Panamá Canal Zone, with special exhibitions mounted in the Panama Canal Zone’s Library and Museum (now dissolved), open to all Zonians. This paper argues that the Archaeological Society of Panamá enfolded Panamanian pasts into a growing sense of American heritage, revising the boundaries of American sovereignty to include the archaeological subsoil. Through archival sources and object analysis at the Panama Canal Archives and the Hearst Museum collections, a story emerges of how Zonians renegotiated Panama’s proprietary past for a more expansive definition of ancient American heritage.

Tomás Mendizábal (Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales - AIP) will serve as a commentator for the session.

Isobel Oliver (University of Oxford), "Dr James Hunt and the Law of Race: Reassessing the 'Anthropological Controversy'"

During the 1860s, the scientific study of human variety was institutionally and intellectually divided between the Ethnological Society of London and the Anthropological Society of London. Through the periodical record and society proceedings, this essay recovers the rival conceptions of human difference that divided the mid-Victorian ‘science of man’. The Prichardian and Darwinian ethnological traditions treated races as differing in degree along a common developmental scale, while the anthropology derived from Robert Knox’s transcendental anatomy and doctrine of serial unity saw races as differing in kind, each possessing particular psychological traits that were inseparable from their physical type. Contrary to both contemporary and historiographical characterisations, the ‘anthropologicals’ neither advocated a particular theory of human origins nor opposed Darwin’s theory in itself, only rejecting the universalist premises they saw as underlying its early application to man. The true disagreement was over the present nature and extent of racial difference. In organising human varieties within a civilisational hierarchy that supposed all peoples capable of ‘improvement’ towards a European standard, the ethnological position represented an essential tenet of imperialist ideology. By contrast, and surprisingly, the anthropologicals’ racial essentialism at times proceeded through a form of descriptive relativism from which missionary enterprise and imperial rule could be, and were, denounced.

Group Co-Convener Amy Woodson-Boulton will provide an opening commentary. 

For our first session of the year, Bethany Anderson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) will present her in-progress article manuscript, "Becoming a Cybernetic Observer: Margaret Mead and a Human Science for the Cold War."

Margaret Mead’s writings and projects during the Cold War reveal a cybernetic approach to culture, science, and statecraft. Following her participation in the Macy Conferences (1946-1953), cybernetics not only brought epistemological questions to the fore, but became a significant ontology that Mead adopted as part and parcel of a scientific and political vision for the world. Understanding her work as an extension of the cybernetic project reframes how we situate Mead within intellectual histories of anthropology and cybernetics and offers valuable insights into the state of anthropology during this period, the story of the discipline’s ‘reflexive turn,’ and the utopian hope that cybernetics could be a science of the human. This paper traces Mead’s use of cybernetics through a few key projects, including her work on Soviet character for the RAND Corporation (1948-1950) and Columbia University’s Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) program (1948-1953), her writings on democratic institutions and world peace, and communications research. Mead was part of a generation of anthropologists who believed that the disciplinary insights from anthropology could be used to aid U.S. foreign policy. She eventually found anthropology by itself to be insufficient to those ends and adopted cybernetics as an alternative (but complementary) framework. Beyond foregrounding interdisciplinarity, cybernetics (especially second-order cybernetics) presented a new kind of methodology: a human science in which practitioners are reflexive, self-aware, introspective, and empathetic, and view themselves as an integral part of the systems they observe. It was this kind of human science in which Mead positioned herself and advocated for an integrative science and a unified world.

Samuel Collins (Towson University) will serve as a commentator for the session.

Matthew C. Watson (Mount Holyoke College), "Reading Roads: Infrastructures of Ethnography," a selection from an in-progress book manuscript provisionally titled The Ethnographic Drive: Technologies of Fieldwork in Chiapas, 1951-1966.

The midcentury Mexican state designed infrastructural campaigns to bring Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking communities of highland Chiapas into “communication” with the nation. At the core of these campaigns were roads. In 1944, the Secretary of Communications and Public Works conscripted male residents of communities including Chamula and Zinacantán into the hard labor of building the Panamerican Highway. Seven years later, the newly-established Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) initiated a pilot development project in Chiapas. The director of the first INI coordinating center, physician-anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, inaugurated this work by surveying dirt paths for prospects to extend roads to more isolated communities, a necessary condition for the agency’s suite of agricultural, health, and educational interventions. State policy materialized roads as infrastructures of an acculturative indigenist action anthropology governed by the Mexican political mythology of mestizaje, or racial-cultural mixture. Building on archival research into the development agency’s extensive and fine-grained internal reports, I read the emerging road network as a technology that sparked political and cultural contradictions in indigenous Chiapas. Where a nationalist vision animated by ideologies of progress constructed roads as vehicles of liberty-qua-mobility, some Tzotziles perceived infrastructural work as a political incursion into their highly-autonomous communities. This chapter argues, then, that road construction marked a threshold of state and anthropological power. Refusals of conscription into road construction labor frustrated state campaigns, leading the INI to invite Harvard and University of Chicago anthropologists to design projects explaining local impediments to “induced culture change” in Chiapas. While new roads made this anthropological fieldwork possible, many U.S. ethnographers ignored their own imbrication in state power. They even came to valorize local refusals as reflections of a laudable indigenous cultural resilience.

Henry Schmidt (University of California, Berkeley), "Invention and Federal Ethnology in the US"

In the final third of the nineteenth century, ethnologists engaged in new ways with the matter of how and why human culture develops. In the United States, a community of ethnologists based in Washington, DC articulated their answers to those questions by drawing on the concept of ‘invention.’

This paper will discuss how ethnologists at the Smithsonian Institution and Bureau of Ethnology like Otis Mason, WJ McGee, and others established invention as a way of framing the character and significance of cultural artifacts, especially in relation to what McGee called the ‘science of the artificial.’ It argues that they appropriated the concept from another federal institution concerned with the analysis and representation of human artifacts, namely the Patent Office. It will discuss what it meant in practice to regard artifacts as inventions, why it served their particular scientific ambitions, and why doing so was opposed by other colleagues, not least the young Franz Boas. 

The piece concludes by reflecting on two points: first, the significance of these figures in the subsequent construction of ‘technology’ as an object of social scientific reasoning; and second, on how the concept of invention’s translation from patent law to ethnological accounts of human development helps us understand certain tendencies in later histories and anthropologies of technology.

We are very grateful to Brooke Penaloza-Patzak and John Tresch, who will be providing opening commentaries. 

Amy Woodson-Boulton (Loyola Marymount University), "The Question of Kinship: Totemism, Animal Ancestors, and the Evolution of Culture"

”The Question of Kinship: Totemism, Animal Ancestors, and the Evolution of Culture” takes a new view of the cultural history of totemism. Contextualizing anthropology in British culture, and in particular the interplay between new theories and visual culture, architecture, exhibitions, museums, and the periodical press, reveals both how totemism emerged out of exhibition practice and colonial collecting, as well as how the idea captured the public imagination. Considering the extent to which totemism became a compelling and widely popular metanarrative allows us to consider the bigger question of how British culture metabolized the revolutionary implications of Darwin’s theories for radical kinship across the animal kingdom. At the same time, social evolutionism framed modern cultural forms like “art” and “science” as proof of a different relationship to the natural world, turning it into a resource for aesthetics, technology, or knowledge. The theory of totemism illustrates very clearly how Victorians engaged with—and connected—concepts like “nature” and “art,” and how they used these to distinguish their own cultural practices from those of the peoples they colonized, even as these terms remained under intense debate. The natural world might have given rise to humans, according to Darwinian theory, but modern society could redefine nature as something to be exploited, appreciated aesthetically, or understood scientifically. New, mechanized technologies and techniques of circulating and interpreting visual and material culture facilitated new theories and practices of ordering objects and people.

Commentator: Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

We are excited that the work for our March discussion will be a chapter from a work in progress by Alex Golub (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), "Projects and Problematics: Marshall Sahlins in Paris, 1967-1969."

Commentators: David H. Price and Robert Hancock

Rosanna Dent (University of Cambridge), "Research Subjectivities: Becoming Each Other’s “Others” in 1950s Central Brazil"

This chapter examines the fieldwork of social anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis and his family in the first decades of state-sponsored expansion into A’uwẽ (Xavante) territory in Central Brazil. Traveling to the A’uwẽ aldeia of Wedezé with his wife and small child in 1958 for doctoral research, Maybury-Lewis was the first academic researcher to conduct and publish an ethnography of A’uwẽ society. He and his family were also the first non-A’uwẽ to insist on living in the community and trail residents with notebooks and incessant questions. Maybury-Lewis’ 1958 field research and subsequent structuralist account established “the Xavante” and A’uwẽ society as an object of study and an origin point for modern anthropology in Brazil. I offer a critical reading of Maybury-Lewis’ two monographs—one popular and one scholarly—to examine how the anthropologist and his hosts came to see themselves differently through their interactions. The chapter explores the ways early fieldwork helped form community members’ understandings of research as a set of practices and how they worked to establish relationality as a mandate. 

We are excited to announce that Caleb Shelburne (Harvard University) will join us in December to discuss "Teaching Resources at the History of Anthropology Review." Teaching Resources at the History of Anthropology Review." 

This session will be devoted to the History of Anthropology Review's new teaching initiative. The project has two main goals: to help instructors hone their teaching through reference to existing syllabi in the field; and to facilitate research in the history of anthropology, from creating general reading lists to exploring different approaches to a familiar topic. We will learn about the development of the project and discuss work it has published in order to launch a more general discussion about where pedagogy in the history of anthropology stands today.

We are delighted that in Novembre we are discussing the draft paper "Confronting Development: Ethnocide and its International Revival after 1968" by Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania)

In this paper, I examine the work of anthropologists and human rights activists who revived the notion of ethnocide as a political and scientific category in the Americas from the late 1960s to 1980s. Concerned by the destruction of Indigenous cultures, these experts organized a series of symposia and conferences that produced various declarations that adopted the term “ethnocide” to condemn the forced integration of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and which began to reinterpret economic development as a form of genocide. For instance, in the 1981 UNESCO Declaration of San José (Costa Rica) experts defined ethnocide as the denial of an ethnic group’s “right to enjoy, develop and transmit its own culture and its own language, whether collectively or individually.” The 1981 Declaration also called on governments to counter “ethnocide” by implementing policies “guaranteeing ethnic groups the free enjoyment of their own cultures” and dubbed this process “ethnodevelopment”. I argue that this late twentieth century revival represents a significant shift in interpretations of violence toward Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Commentators: Rosanna Dent and Robert Hancock                                                                                                                                                        

Please note that will will not have an October meeting. See you in November! 

Ricardo Fagoaga, "How did they make her (them) invisible? Mexican women anthropologists of the early twentieth century and the making of the anthropological record"

We will meet to discuss work in progress that recounts the story of early women anthropologists and ethnographers who were students at the National Museum of Mexico. Taking a biographical approach, the paper argues that these women can be regarded as pioneers of our discipline, though they have been largely erased from the “official” historiography. With particular sensitivity to linguistic erasures, the paper highlights specific factors that have contributed to the invisibility of women anthropologists of the early twentieth century within the canon and through broader historical narratives of anthropology.

Our own Paula López Caballero will provide an opening commentary. 

Dario di Rosa (University of the South Pacific) "Melanesia: A Semantic History" The name ‘Melanesia’ looms large in the mythistory of anthropology as the site where the ethnographic method took its modern form, as well as the locus for many important theoretical concepts (gift exchange, big-men, cargo cults, dividuals, etc.). While all students of anthropology are exposed to ‘Melanesia’ in their studies, most specialists of the region are quick to add caveats to its definition. Moreover, Pacific scholars have since dissected the racialist (and racist) implications of the term at the time of its inception, when Dumont d’Urville used it in a landmark 1832 paper which divided the Pacific into the macro-regions we are familiar with: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Yet, despite its historical baggage and the inescapable difficulties when trying to define it, the demise of the term is nowhere in sight. This paper endeavours to answer why this is the case by tracing the semantic history of the term ‘Melanesia’ – as well as its relationship with the other regions included in d’Urville’s original model – across a number of later national and disciplinary discursive fields.

Dario has provided work in progress for us to read. The first is a table of contents that maps out the project. Following that is the introduction and chapter 1, which he would like us to read. Following this main text, he has shared a list of images and three maps. Enjoy!

John Tresch, The Warburg Institute

With commentary from Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute) and Cameron Brinitzer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Excerpts from Cosmograms: How To Do Things with Worlds

Please note: The main reading is Chapter 2! John has also shared the Introduction and Chapter 1 for anyone who would like some extra context or a sense of what the book is like more generally. These are completely optional and can be skimmed or skipped.

This session's readings are draft chapters from a short book about cosmograms, or objects which express the universe, in scientific and other contexts. It's a contribution to symmetrical anthropology, the anthropology of nature, history of science, and the strands of art history concerned with media and the materiality of images. Examples are given from around the world, with particular attention to scientific cosmograms and the variety of universes they propose and help maintain. These selections reflect on the history of the concept of "cosmology" and explain why studying cosmograms in action is a useful tool for history and anthropology-- and in particular for recent interest in global histories of science and technology. Cosmograms are also useful for natural scientists, artists, and activists to think with, and new ones are needed now. 

We will be taking a well-deserved Spring Break in April and will resume our meeting schedule in May. Take care, all!

We are delighted that in March we are discussing the draft paper "Closed Mouth, Open Mind: Lewis Henry Morgan and the Religion of Cognition" by Daniel Gorman Jr. (University of Rochester). Professor Sarah Dees (Iowa State University) will be our esteemed commentator for this session.

Abstract:

This article explores the religious nonconformity of nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose religious radicalism contrasted sharply with his Protestant cultural roots and solidly Victorian, middle-class lifestyle. Morgan was raised a Presbyterian in New York’s Burned-over District amid revivals and Anti-Masonic fervor, yet the existing historiography does not interrogate the relationship between this milieu and Morgan’s later deism and fondness for secret societies. To understand Morgan’s complex beliefs, I analyze Morgan’s papers and published writings, from his first speeches (1840–41) to his magnum opus Ancient Society (1877). I also foreground Morgan’s relationships with his wife Mary, his close friend Rev. J. H. McIlvaine, and colleagues such as Charles Darwin. Although it is well known that Morgan believed all animals could think, I argue that Morgan’s mental principle—his name for the spiritual origin of thought—was the core of an idiosyncratic theology that deviated from Christian dogma. Morgan viewed cognition, not Christ, as God’s gift to the world, and he believed that the development of cognition guided animal progress. This theology blended Presbyterianism, Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution, and deism, while cautiously embracing Darwinian biological evolution. Simultaneously, Morgan’s public persona reflected white, middle-class, Protestant values: Morgan recommended the Christianization of Native Americans, socialized with devout Protestants, and struggled to accept new scientific discoveries. His life therefore involved a constant dance between his private religion, the Protestantism of his peers, and new academic disciplines such as religious studies and natural history.

We are delighted that in February we are discussing the draft paper "'Race theory' in 20th century Mexico? Historicizing (histories of ) indigenismo and of physical anthropology in transnational contexts" by Francisco Vergara Silva (UNAM). Professor Peter Wade (Manchester) and Ricardo Roque (Lisbon) will be our esteemed commentators for this session!!

Abstract:

The first and second versions of the UNESCO Declarations on Race and Racism were being published and evaluated internationally in the early 1950’s. More or less simultaneously, Mexican scholar-cum-politician Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán was openly using racial(ist) classificatory vocabulary to refer to the ‘human difference’ that sociocultural anthropologists were busy characterizing, in the context of ongoing State-sponsored efforts at indigenista research centers and stations away from Mexico City (e.g. the ‘Centros Coordinadores Indigenistas’ in Chiapas and Chihuahua). Aguirre Beltrán’s further references –sparse but significant, throughout his trajectoryto concepts in ‘human evolution and genetics’ might be understood (but not necessarily justified) in view of his initial training as a medical doctor. However, Aguirre Beltrán did not consider himself an expert in matters related to physical anthropology. In fact, most members of the elite defining indigenista policies in mid-20th century Mexico usually agreed that such role should be reserved for Juan Comas Camps, the Spanish expat professor who would later become the central figure of Mexican physical anthropology. During that process of career transformation and consolidation, Comas was recruited as a ‘helpful hand’ to official indigenismo, providing a scientific (but also political) service that had been already envisioned as necessary by Manuel Gamio.

The central theme of this session is informed by a long-term research project on Juan Comas himself a member of some of the aforementioned UNESCO commissions– and his role in the history of 20th century physical anthropology in Mexico. Paying special attention to the transnational networks in which Comas and other physical anthropologists, but also Aguirre Beltrán and their peers were embedded, in the provided materials I suggest that certain histories of Mexican indigenismo may have been missing some elements of the ‘race science / scientific racist’ projects (following nuanced versions of Alice Conklin’s definitions, derived from her historiographic perspectives on French physical anthropology) that Mexican physical anthropology amounted to, not only in the late 19th and early 20th century, but also for the most part of Mexican indigenismo’s ‘golden years’. I do not wish to imply that historiographies of Mexican and transnational physical anthropology should take absolute precedence over existing and further critical analyses of Mexican indigenismo. (On the contrary, I briefly state that some already produced histories of 20th century Mexican physical anthropology seem inadequate when they dislocate that discipline from the politics of indigenismo.) I argue instead that the local (but transnationally grounded) matrix / source that I call ‘Mexican race theory’ should receive a broader treatment, as it went beyond ‘scientific ideology’ and developed not only in indigenismo and in physical anthropology, but also in hybrid configurations of academic and public discourse and practice. Among these additional configurations, I propose to include eugenics, biotypology, ‘mestizaje talk’, and (via notions of ‘improvement of stocks’) even agronomy and allied research areas concerned with (non-human) species domestication. This more extensive horizon of subject matters for analysis might contribute to renovate viewpoints on the complex currents subtending all-pervasive, never-ending raci(ali)sms in ‘Mexico’ and about ‘Mexicans’.

 
We are delighted that in December we will host Michael Edwards, Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sydney to discuss his work in progress:
 
Wheels Turning: Anthropological Solidarity, Engaged Buddhism, and a Return to the 1990s
 
In the conventional histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for example, or the 1980s. This article experiments with a comparative reading of a decade closer to our fraught present: the 1990s. With an eye to the discipline’s current impasses, and with the benefit of some three decades’ distance, I join others in beginning to historicise 90s sociocultural anthropology, tracking its turns amid the cultural moods and political conditions of that moment. I do so by rereading this history obliquely, alongside the history of an adjacent intellectual and social formation, that of engaged Buddhism. Considering how anthropologists and engaged Buddhists grappled, through the 1990s, with a set of related questions—about interdependence, suffering, and engagement—reveals ethical ambitions and political shortcomings that continue to shape pressing debates in both fields today, not least about the promises and practices of solidarity. 
 
Prof. Joel Robbins (Cambridge) and Dr. Erick White (Independent Scholar) will be our esteemed commentators for the session!

We are delighted to welcome Margarita Valdovinos (Inst. Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM, Mexico), who will share a paper on "The Study of Amerindian Languages. The Maya Case." The paper will be discussed by Prof. Fernando Armstrong-Fumero (Smith College) and Emmanuel Szurek (EHESS, Paris)
 
Abstract:
A diachronic reflection about the classes of Yucatec Maya as a second language in Paris (Inalco) brought me to the study of French Americanist traditions and their interest in the understanding of Amerindian languages. At the first quarter of the 19th Century, the discovery of Mayan epigraphic writing by French intellectuals triggered the study of Mayan archaeological sites. Very soon, it became clear that along with archeological studies, the study of language was necessary to decipher the evidences provided by the material vestiges.  
In this paper, I will analyze how Amerindian languages have been studied in two different moments at the French academic context. First, I will study how Amerindian languages became an object of knowledge in the XIXth Century, and then, how in the XXth Century this knowledge is developed until it becomes an object of teaching.  
The observations offered by this study will help me to understand how ideas about language are constructed, how do they emerge in socio-cultural practices, how they travel in time and space and how they interact with one another.  

We are looking forward to discussing the draft paper, "Writing History into the Economy of Nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Lars Montin (1723-1793) on the Reindeer Warble Fly (Hypoderma tarandi L.)," with Staffan Müller-Wille (Cambridge). The paper will be discussed by Prof. Jia Hui Lee (U of Bayreuth)
Abstract: In the summer of 1732, a young medical student named Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) journeyed through Sápmi. Just under two decades later, Lars Montin (1723-1778), a student of the now widely known Uppsala professor Linnaeus, quite literally followed his teacher's footsteps. We will focus on the accounts that both naturalists gave in their travel journals of the parasitic reindeer warble fly Hypoderma tarandi. While Linnaeus integrated the life history of this fly with his idealized image of Sámi pastoralism as representing a 'silver age' of humanity in tune with the balance of nature, Montin mused about ways in which the fly's damaging effects on reindeer could be weaponized to change the course of history and force the Sámi into 'productive' labour. As a consequence, Linnaeus's timeless conception of an economy of nature was infused with notions of historical development and an open future. We will suggest that the differing attitudes of Linneaus and Montin can be explained by changes in the political context that shaped their respective expeditions--most notably an emerging effort to enforce national borders and fiscal regimes in Northern Scandinavia in the 1740s and 1750s. The different attitudes they developed towards the reindeer warble fly also point to deeper connections between natural history practices and the writing of human histories.
 

We are delighted that this month our co-convener Paula López Caballero (UNAM, Cambridge) will share her paper, "Outline of a “bastard” theory of racialisation: Mestizaje and vernacular dynamics of identification in Mexico (1940-1960).”
 
Matt Watson (Mount Holyoke) and Rosanna Dent (Cambridge) will offer comments to get discussion started. 

We are very pleased to have Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) join us in May.
Title: Eugène Pittard, Bayan Afet, and Others: Actors and Milieus of Anthropological Knowledge and the Formation of the Turkish History Thesis in the 1930s
Abstract: My study delves into the formation of racial-anthropological knowledge by Swiss and Turkish political elite, anthropologists, and historians during the 1930s, focusing on its role in the political narratives of Turkish nation-building. Central to this research is Eugène Pittard, founder of the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève and the first Chair of Anthropology at the Université de Genève. Pittard was instrumental in challenging the scientific validity of racial categorizations, yet paradoxically, he also championed the "Turkish History Thesis," which posited that the "Turkish race" is superior and ancestral to European races.  This argument aligned well with the ideological needs of Turkey's nation-building efforts at the time. My investigation is part of a DFG-funded project that scrutinizes the production and dissemination of "racial" knowledge within Turkey through various networks, involving a diverse group of European and Turkish scholars, cultural diplomats, and political figures. By analyzing extensive archival materials from Switzerland, Germany, and Turkey, I aim to unravel the complex interactions among these actors and their use of anthropological knowledge for political purposes. Ultimately, this work seeks to enrich our understanding of the history of anthropology in Turkey by offering a critical analysis of these historical dynamics that can challenge the existing disciplinary narratives.
Our commentators will be Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania) and Katja Geisenhainer (Frobenius Institute—Goeth University). 
 

April's session will feature an informal talk by Joanna Radin (Yale) titled "Michael Crichton's Racial Calculations for 1960s Anthropology." There will not be a pre-circulated reading for this session. 
 

Presenter: Adrianna Link (American Philosophical Society).

Title: (Re)Inventing Anthropology's History through Crisis and Collections at the American Philosophical Society
 
Abstract: This chapter uses the growth of the American Philosophical Society’s anthropological and linguistic collections during the mid-20th century to explore connections between American anthropology’s documentary impulse and the lead up to its disciplinary reckonings in the late-1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on my positionality as both an employee of the APS and as a historian of anthropology trained within a history of science tradition, I consider how anthropology’s disciplinary histories have shaped and continue to shape the function of the Society’s Indigenous collections by highlighting two key moments in their development: 1) the 1945 deposit of papers from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Committee on Native American Languages and the concurrent launch of the Phillips Fund; and, 2) events leading up to the 1965 publication of the Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American Indian in the Library of the American Philosophical Society and the subsequent 1967 conference on “The American Indian,” which itself was held as part of a larger series of conferences related to the Society’s program in the history of science. I suggest that while the APS’s archives proved important to the process of establishing the contours of anthropology’s history and its disciplinary reinvention in the late 1960s, the emphasis on history of anthropology also effectively obscured the contributions and authority of Indigenous peoples in the creation and processing of many of its collections. The chapter ultimately concludes with a discussion about what the intertwined histories of anthropology’s archival and disciplinary formation might reveal about the field’s continued sense of crisis, both as it pertains to its shifting disciplinary standards and to the ethical stewardship of Indigenous materials.
Paper available below!
 
 

 
We are very pleased to have Ramon Folch González (Arizona State University) join us in February.
 
Title: Frans Blom in Chiapas, Mexico & the World: recovering information on art, looters and collections (1943-1963) from local archival sources
 
Abstract: This paper analyses the role played by Frans Blom in the Mesoamerican antiquities trade in Chiapas during the 1940's and 50's trough the unpublished documents stored in the Na Bolom Museum archives. The details of Blom's life are very well known and the sheer size of his archives allows us to learn his opinions and instances where he collaborated with collectors as well. There are few anthropologists whose life is as documented as Blom's and this is a way to understand how ambivalent some postures were towards collectionism and looting in the early days of Mexican anthropology. I consider Blom played a crucial role in delaying the looting phenomenon in Chiapas until the 1960's, his letters show him well informed about looting and his broad network of friends and acquaintances allowed him to denounce what he considered wrongdoing. The rich archives at Na Bolom also inform us about the contextual information of many museum objects both in Mexico and overseas, in some cases museum director would ask Blom for advice about an object and his opinion would be taken for granted, some of the contextual information in museums to this days can be traced to an informed opinion by Blom.  tracing the little contributions made by scholars to museum collection via correspondence sheds light on the great complex network of knowledge transmission during the mid-XXth century. This case can serve as an illustrative example to study the life of other historical figures and study them beyond their published works. 
 
Our commentators will be Matteo Bortolini (Università di Padua) and Sam Holley-Klein (University of Maryland).
 

*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
Our first meeting of 2024 will revolve around the work of Sam Holley-Kline (University of Maryland, College Park).
 
Title: Managing Archaeology at the United Fruit Company, 1908-1952
 
Abstract: Maya archaeologists collaborated with the United Fruit Company during the first half of the twentieth century. In Guatemala, the Company funded research projects in Quiriguá (1910-1915) and Zaculeu (1946-1949). While scholarship increasingly recognizes the interpretative convergences between archaeological and corporate interests in the context of U.S. imperialism, the day-to-day administration of funds and management of workers have been relatively less examined. Based on archival research, I suggest that focusing on these areas draws archaeology into the political economy of U.S. imperialism and broader practices of racial discrimination—but these worked differently based on corporate objectives and local socioeconomic conditions. I conclude by advocating for bottom-up approaches to the history of archaeology that cross established historiographic boundaries. 
 
Our commentators will be Christopher Heaney (Pennsylvania State University) and Matthew Watson (Mount Holyoke College).
 

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak is a Marie Jahoda Fellow at the University of Vienna, Department for Economic and Social History, and joins us to workshop a chapter from her book manuscript "With Objects at Hand. The Rise and Fall of the Natural Science of Human Culture, 1860-1930"

We will be reading a draft of her final chapter entitled "The Great War and Science in Terms of Flour and Fat."

The chapter centers on the fate of liberal, international Americanist anthropology in the inter-war period from a broader history of science perspective. Central themes include long-term engagements linking object-based methods and frameworks for research into cultural and biological development, the 20th-century fate of pan-German ethos born of the European revolutions of 1848, trans-national campaigns to debunk pseudoscientific race science, and the sale of 19th-century ethnographic collections by German and Austrian-based scientists liquidating "personal" assets to cover basic living costs.
 
We will be joined by Lee Baker (Duke University) and Cameron Brinitzer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) will provide commentary for Brooke's chapter.

Taylor Dysart joins us from the University of Pennsylvania to workshop a chapter from her dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century" 
 
Abstract: My dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century,” examines the history of psychedelics research through the prism of ayahuasca, a plant derivative native to the lowlands of the Amazon basin. It does so by tracing how a network of transnational and multidisciplinary researchers in the human and life sciences transformed ayahuasca from plant medicine into biomedical therapeutic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. These researchers relied extensively on the knowledges and practices of mestizo and Indigenous healers, especially those of Tucano- and Shipibo-descent, who held longstanding relations with ayahuasca. Ultimately, this project reimagines the history of psychedelic science and medicine as one where Amazonia is paramount.
 
The first chapter of my dissertation recounts how and why ayahuasca, a plant derivative native to the lowlands of the Amazon basin, first became a matter of concern for naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century. I begin this story in Panuré, a small settlement in Brazilian Amazonia, where the English botanist Richard Spruce first observed how Tucano men imbibed ayahuasca in 1852. In addition to Spruce, numerous naturalists from along the Americas and the European continent, remarked not only on ayahuasca’s ceremonial and everyday uses but speculated as to its medicinal and psychical potential. At the same time, I demonstrate how these naturalists drew ayahuasca and its world into the shifting discourses of primitive savagery, racial degeneration, and Darwinian logics of extinction, while observing how it remained intimately connected to both real and imagined violence as turbulent post-colonial states increasingly expanded into Amazonian borderlands. 
 
We will be joined by Geoff Bil (University of Delaware) and Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge) who will provide commentary on Taylor's chapter. 

To kick off the academic year, Nicholas Barron will join us to share his article, "Lessons in Safe Logic: Reassessing Anthropological and Liberal Imaginings of Termination," which has been accepted by the Journal of Anthropological Research. 
 
As it is unusual for us to read a piece in press, we have paired it with two pieces to help broaden the conversation: Akhil Gupta and Jesse Stoolman’s recently published “Decolonizing US Anthropology” (2022) and George Pierre Castile’s “Federal Indian Policy and Anthropology” (2004). These pieces are intended as points of contextualization, comparison, and enrichment. As Nick continues to work on the material presented in this article, the session will still contribute to his ongoing work. 
 
We are thrilled to have commentary from Laura Stark (Vanderbilt) and David Dinwoodie (University of New Mexico). 
 
Abstract: "Building upon recent efforts to assess the history of anthropology in light of renewed calls for disciplinary decolonization, this paper turns to the role of US anthropologists in the infamous policy period known as Termination. Contextualizing the activism of the applied anthropologist John H. Provinse against the backdrop of broader shifts in post-WWII, US liberalism, I argue that Provinse’s support for Termination in the late 1940s reflected an embattled social democratic and pluralistic conception of Indian-US relations. This perspective contrasted with and was ultimately overshadowed by the assimilatory sentiments that would become institutionalized in the Termination policies of the 1950s. Thus, Provinse provides an analytical opening from which to explore the discipline’s relationship with Termination as well as the affordances and limitations of liberal anthropological activism. Moreover, such a case offers a generous rejoinder to more speculative assessments of the discipline’s many pasts."
 
***
Late breaking addition: If you are interested in the broader context for the Gupta and Stoolman piece, it responds in part to pieces by two of our working group members, Herb Lewis and Ira Bashkow. Lewis and Bashkow's pieces are now included in the packet of readings as optional complements to the month's reading. 

Dr. Beth Linker, "The Making of a Posture Science"
From Aristotle to J. G. Herder, Western thinkers argued that bipedalism served as an important marker of human superiority, distinguishing human from non-human animals. It was not until the late-nineteenth century, in the wake of the Darwinian revolution and of a new, surveillance-based public health system, that scientists would begin to claim that poor posture was a grave health concern that had reached epidemic proportions, threatening the entire human race. 
 
The first chapter of my forthcoming book, Slouch, traces the complex genealogical beginnings of the posture sciences and seeks to explain why erect human posture became something that comparative anatomists, physicians, and physical anthropologists studied with great concern and zeal. The chapter opens in 1891 with the discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or “Java Man,” seen by many as the “missing link” between human beings and apes. Research into the origins of bipedalism flourished in the Anglo-American world, taken up by men such as surgeon-anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith and Earnest Hooton. They and many of their colleagues argued that human beings were maladapted to the modern world for bipedalism appeared to cause significant respiratory illness, abdominal disorders, and foot weakness, conditions unobserved among non-human animals. 
 
This cross-disciplinary interest in human evolution and physiology, along with social and cultural concerns about immigration, racial fitness, Empire, eugenics, and industrial efficiency, made the posture sciences possible. Moreover, the evolutionary sciences provided a convincing “outbreak” narrative for the poor posture epidemic, persuading many white middle-class professionals to engage in an anti-slouching crusade. Though the cause of the slouching epidemic resided in the deep past, it nevertheless persisted as a condition from which theoretically every human being could suffer.

Jason Pribilsky joins us from Whitman College to workshop his chapter, “Dream Collecting in the Cold War Andes: Probing and Projecting Indigenous Interiors in Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos.”
 
Abstract: My work chronicles the efforts of midcentury anthropologists working in the early Cold War in the Peruvian Andes to turn Indigenous peoples toward modernization and away from threats of social unrest and communist persuasion. It forms a portion of a book-in-progress on the Vicos Project (1952-1966), a long-term development intervention whereby Cornell University social scientists purchased the lease to an anemic highlands hacienda and turned it into a self-styled laboratory for the study of culture change. Throughout, I focus closely on the fieldwork encounter – its various transactions, fraught exchanges, and moral ambiguities – to understand the politics of field practice, Indigenous agency and refusal, and a fuller understanding of the nexus of science, the Cold War, and the importance of Indigenous peoples in this period for geopolitical competition. I attend to ways anthropologists went about creating scientific value called forth by Cold War social science and how simultaneously Indigenous interlocutors compelled their white guests to different forms of self-awareness. In this particular chapter, I focus on efforts of researchers to probe the psychological depths of Indigenous interlocutors through their employment of projective testing methods (e.g., Rorschach and TATs), solicitation and analysis of dreams, and psychoanalysis. Through their attempts, often frustrating, to uncover indications of culture change and modern thinking is revealed researchers’ own anxieties about the self and meanings of the future.
 
We are happy to host Grant Arndt (Iowa State University) and Paula López Caballero (El Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades—La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) as discussants.

 
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.

 
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.

 
Session 4: "Antiblackness and indigeneity"
 
Main readings:

• Patricia M. E. Lorcin, "Imperialism, Colonial Identity, and Race in Algeria 1830-1870: The Role of the French Medical Corps," Isis 90 no. 4 (1999): 653-79. https://doi.org/10/fspzkm.
• Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). https://www.dukeupress.edu/possessing-polynesians. Excerpt: Chapter 2, "Conditionally Caucasian: Polynesian Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century Eugenics and Physical Anthropology."

 
Additional readings:

• Warwick Anderson and Ricardo Roque, “Introduction: Imagined Laboratories: Colonial and National Racialisations in Island Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (October 2018): 358–71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463418000309.
• Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108277778. Excerpt: Chapter 1, "Outside of Society: Slavery and Citizenship."

 
Session 3: "Race, slavery, ethnography"
 
This session considers two very different texts—one ethnographic, one historical—that consider racism, race science, and slavery as central structures of "enlightened" industrial modernity:
 

• Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Duke University Press, 2019).
• Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

 
Below are suggested excerpts for a short, medium, and longer reading, depending on the time readers have available (all readings/excerpts are available in the zip file below if you are logged into your CHSTM account):
 

SHORT VERSION: 56 pp

• Thomas: introduction excerpts pp. 1-7, 14-19; chapter 1 excerpts pp. 22-32, 52-60
• Curran: chapter 4 excerpts pp. 167-86, 190-94, 199-204

 
MEDIUM VERSION: 78 pp

• Thomas: add preface pp. xi-xv
• Curran: add preface pp. ix-xi and introduction excerpt pp. 1-15

 
LONG VERSION: 150 pp

• Thomas: read full preface + introduction + chapter 1
• Curran: read full preface + introduction + chapter 4

For those interested in hearing the oral testimony of Tivoli Gardens community members captured by Thomas (in ch 1 excerpts), see also: https://www.tivolistories.com/bearing-witness.html.
 
Additional readings:

• David Graeber, “Turning Modes of Production inside out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a Transformation of Slavery,” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2006): 61–85.
• Terence D. Keel, “Religion, Polygenism and the Early Science of Human Origins,” History of the Human Sciences 26, no. 2 (2013): 3–32.
• Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (Rutgers University Press, 2004). [Excerpt: introduction]

 
Session 2: "Race in American anthropology"
 
This session focuses on work by Lee D. Baker to explore the history of American anthropology and its role in creating, reinforcing, and challenging racial categories. We selected a forthcoming piece  from Baker to capture a picture of American anthropology that is wider than its predominant figure, Franz Boas (around which many histories have been narrated). However, recognizing the continuing importance of Boas studies, we will also read an essay by Geoff Bil that reviews 3 major recent works on Boas and offers a critical evaluation of the direction Boas histories are going.
 
Main readings:

• Lee D. Baker, "W.E.B. Du Bois & Anthropology." (forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois) 
• Geoff Bil, “Boas in the Age of BLM and Idle No More: Re-Evaluting the Boasian Legacy,” History of Anthropology Review 44 (September 14, 2020).

 
Additional readings:

• Ira Bashkow, “The Boas Circle vs. White Supremacy,” History of Anthropology Review 44 (June 15, 2020), http://histanthro.org/reviews/the-boas-circle-vs-white-supremacy/.
• Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520211681/from-savage-to-negro. [Introduction and chapter 5, "Rethinking Race at the Turn of the Century: W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Boas," provided below.]

Please use pass code 989255 to join the meeting
Session 1: "Anthropology and the universal liberal human"
 
In this first session, led by Rosanna Dent (NJIT), we will read pieces by Ryan Cecil Jobson and Sylvia Wynter that consider how anthropology is mired by problems of the (so-called) universal liberal human. Readings for this opening session are longer than we anticipate future sessions will be (normally we aim for ~50pp max). Given the length of Wynter's piece, we have provided Elisabeth Paquette's encyclopedia article for a guide to Wynter's work. PDFs of all readings (main and additional) are provided in the "Session 1 Readings."
 
Main readings:

• Ryan Cecil Jobson, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2 (2020): 259–71, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398.
• Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337, https://doi.org/10/d2js45.

 
Additional readings:

• Elisabeth Paquette, “Wynter and Decolonization,” in Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. Michael A. Peters (Singapore: Springer, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_476-1.
• Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre, “Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy (introduction),” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 65–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13351.