Program

Filip Wróblewski (Museum of Engineering and Technology in Krakow, Poland)

Ethnographic archives after years. Recycling and re-use

Paper will be focused on the issue of pontificated use of archival resources produced by anthropologists. Indicated issues will be presented in relation to archival materials used to write history of anthropology. In relation to the practices of making digitized collections available to a wider audience. Based on selected examples from Polish anthropology archival initiatives will be presented examples: The case of the Digital Archive of Józef Burszta will be used to show power of impact on local communities of materials “liberated” in accordance with open access and creative commons policies. It will also allow the presentation activities on the borderline of disciplines and the “opening” the history of anthropology to artistic activities. A research project focused on the generation of the last witnesses of World War II, using materials left over from the Nazi “Racial and Folklore Research” at the Institute for German Studies in the East (IDO), will show, above all, the dangerous potential inherent in ethnographic archives. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on describing “uncomfortable” aspects of antrhropology history. The project of digitizing the archive and field materials of Stanislaw Poniatowski is a great example of restoring the memory of the anthropological community of somewhat forgotten researchers. Popularization activities carried out by the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow based on the resources of the Laboratory for Documenting Folk Art is a great example of attempts to tell the history of 20th century anthropology and build a meta-commentary on the research practices of anthropology and its discourse.

Anna Caroline Haubold (Herder-Institut, Germany)

The archives as a field site: from the threshold of the archives to the reading room and back to the researcher’s desk

Anthropologists see the archives as field site and not as a static institution preserving archival documents. The archives are subject to various dynamics, e.g., power relations. Archivists are gatekeepers and may have great influence on the outcome of the research. But not only does the accessibility to archival documents affect the research but also the “allure of the archives” (Farge 2013). The archives have power to delight, astonish and absorb the researcher (but also to overwhelm and frustrate). The critical analysis should not begin when the researcher sits in the reading room bended over the historical documents but when she/he crosses the threshold of the archives. In my paper I examine on the one hand the archives as social field with encounters and (unwritten) rules, and on the other hand emotions during fieldwork and their influence on knowledge production. The sensory and emotional experiences of archival research as well as the archival documents with their material power(fulness) gain epistemological value and should be an indispensable part of the ethnographic writings.

Kelly Fitzgerald (University College Dublin, Ireland)

The Irish Folklore Commission and the Irish Civil War

The Irish Folklore Commission, now housed in the National Folklore Collection, UCD, was formed in 1935. The foundation of this Commission occurred twelve years after the end of the Irish Civil War. Members involved in the creation of the IFC fell on both sides of the 1921-22 Treaty Debate. The IFC had folkloric, ethnographic fieldwork carried out by full-time and part-time collectors. The collectors worked in areas where they were most likely were reared and raised. They worked at a local and regional level in the name of the national. The Bureau of Military History Collection, 1913-1921 is a collection of witness statements, photographs and voice recordings that were collected by the State between 1947 and 1957, in order to gather primary source material for the revolutionary period in Ireland from 1913 to 1921. The Bureau’s voice recordings were produced with the co-operation of the IFC during the period 1950 to 1951. In this age of digitisation, previous archival collections can be brought together in ways not previously imagined. Critical engagement with this process reveals the nuances of history. In particular, evidence emerges demonstrating the continued impact of the Irish cultural revolution and revival along with religious identity. This, in turn, allows political ideologies to be surpassed. Assessments of this nature facilitate a thorough examination of the workings and processes behind such organisations. The result allows us to ascertain more clearly how the uncertainties of a civil war may have influenced Irish ethnographic collections.

Diego Ballestero (University of Bonn, Germany)

Epistemologies, Devices and Archives of “Otherness”

Towards the end of the 19th century, Anthropology faced a complex problem: the plausible disappearance of its study object. As a corollary of colonialist expansion, the Indigenous Peoples who had remained “immutable” for centuries seemed doomed to “extinction”. As a discipline devoted to the study of “races”, Anthropology was confronted with the imperative of a profuse recording of these peoples in order to codify and archive their “otherness” for future studies. Taking into account the described context, I analyze the epistemological and material devices implemented by the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872-1938) in order to build a flow information model and a multimedia archive of the Argentinean Indigenous Peoples. During his 30 years as head of the Anthropology Section of the Museum of La Plata (Argentina), Lehmann-Nitsche made photographs, sound recordings and written records in order to obtain, materialize, inscribe and store the “otherness” of the aforementioned peoples. Thus, I examine how these data functioned as material, stable, immutable and transportable inscriptions. At the same time, I explore the complex and extensive network of collaborators, including Indigenous People systematically invisibilized in official publications, which provided him with financial, instrumental and epistemological resources to achieve his objectives. Finally, I show how this case was part of collaborative projects to build transatlantic anthropological archives, which granted temporal immanence to the “otherness” of Indigenous Peoples and proliferated their knowledge in different spaces of knowledge.

Ana Carolina Arias (National University de la Plata, Argentina)

Teachers’ participation in collective gathering of folkloric and anthropological data

In 1921, a large territorial folkloric collection was carried out in Argentina through the administrative networks of elementary schools. In eight months, the National Council of Education, the organism that had promoted this initiative, gathered a set of 88009 files. A total of 3250 collectors from different provinces and national territories participated. The folklore collection was guided by a set of instructions, which also established a classification of what was to be collected. The main categories were four: Beliefs and Customs, Narrations and Proverbs, Art and Popular Knowledge. This presentation focuses in particular on the responses associated with the category of Popular Knowledge, inside the Province of Buenos Aires. This category includes procedures and recipes for curing diseases; vulgar names of animals, plants and celestial phenomena; names of geographical features, sites and roads; and indigenous tribes and languages; among others. Through a set of cases, we analyze where the compiled information came from and what type of data was prioritized in the answers. What I am trying to show is the central role that teachers played in the collection, processing and classification of data related to the anthropological sciences. Especially, regarding indigenous tribes, their customs and languages.

Zsofia J Szoke (University of New Mexico, US)

Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos “Tagungen”

In 1949 the first-time lecturers at the Eranos Meetings in Ascona, Switzerland, were anthropologist Paul Radin, specialist on the Winnebago Tribe, Henry Corbin, expert on Shiite Islam, and Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism. Other prominent contributors included Gerardus van der Leeuw, the famous phenomenologist of religion, Karl Kerényi, the pioneering scholar of Greek mythology, and Adolf E. Jensen, the influential German ethnologist amongst others. Research for my future monograph indicates that Paul Radin became a well-respected lecturer at the Eranos forums where scholars and lay participants came together to exchange ideas, unrestricted by academic boundaries and dogmatism. In contrast, his concepts have been ignored by the dominant social scientific theoretical and methodological approaches, and his oeuvre has been practically absent in standard works on anthropology. In fact, this maverick anthropologist has been systematically marginalized within his own discipline as his ideas and methods fell outside the academic canon. Consider one of his most enduring volumes entitled The Trickster (1956). It is a collaborative piece anchored in the spirit of the Eranos lectures. Yet, there has been no systematic historical treatment of Paul Radin’s connection to this unique scholarly environment. In this paper I will explore the reasons why this might be the case and rediscover Paul Radin’s work through the prism of the Eranos connection. I will also discuss the heuristic import, and the methodological and theoretical challenges of Radin’s non-conformist scholarship to the historiography of anthropology.

Serge Reubi (Centre Alexandre-Koyré, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, France)

Anthropology, photography, and painting. Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania, 1950-1951

In 1950 Swiss anthropologist Jean Gabus organizes an ethnographic expedition in Mauritania as a part of a broader extensive research project in a North-West Africa which he started in 1945 and will pursue until 1980. His work can be understood as a surviving practice of late 19th century ethnography, as he is examining his objects on a very large geographic scale, focuses on the study of material culture, and works in team. If the case is intriguing, his 1950 expedition adds questions about epistemic virtues, personae and visual scientific culture. For this expedition, he asks a renowned Swiss artist Hans Erni to join him to complete what he describes as an objective documentation (objects, photographs, recordings, films, …) with a new way to catch the social life of the populations he studies. He argues that the subjective perception of the artist is able to grasp something that is not fixable by mechanical recording devices and that is “truly human” and universal. In the mid 20th century, he is hence both trusting the abilities of the “sage” (in Daston and Galison’s terminology), and a strong believer in the objectivity of the materiality. The Gabus-Erni collaboration helps us hence to rethink periodization in the history of anthropology but also to contextualize it in the larger frame of the history of sciences and knowledge, from which it has sometimes been separated, hence contributing to a canonical historiography that remained blind to such cases.

Sergei Alymov (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)

How Moscow did not become the world center of Marxist thought. Historian Luidmila V. Danilova, Soviet ethnography and international science in the 1960s

Ernest Gellner’s first publication on Soviet ethnography (1975) introduced Soviet ethnography to the world anthropology. He noticed that its practitioners are much closer to historians and, unlike in Anglophone anthropology, tackle the world history evolutionary issues. Gellner’s article was based on the text by historian Luidmila Danilova (1923-2012), namely her preface to the collection “The Problems of the History of Pre-Capitalist Formations” (1968), which became the main manifesto of Soviet “creative” Marxism in the 1960s. This paper focuses on the fate of Marxist anthropology in the USSR in the late Soviet period (the 1960-1970s). It recovers the story of the “sector of the methodology of history” which became the center of interdisciplinary debates among historians, ethnographers, and philosophers, who were intent on modifying Marxist narrative and suggesting new approaches for thinking about the early states and creation of class societies, modes of exploitation under slavery and feudalism, and changing the Stalinist narrative of “social-economic formations”. These debates had also been prompted by the French Marxists and their new publications about the “Asiatic mode of production”. Based on extensive archival research, the paper claims that Danilova planned numerous innovative publications inviting foreign scholars like E. Gellner, M. Godelier, J. Suret-Canal, E. Hobsbaum Hobsbawm among others. These could have led to making Moscow a center of productive international discussions among left-wing and Marxist intellectuals. This did not happen because the Soviet dogmatic academic establishment banned the publication of the later volumes of “The Problems of the History of Pre-Capitalist Formations”. Danilova could not realize her organizational and theoretical potential, her book on theoretical problems of feudalism remains unpublished. This story is an example of a decline of a paradigm (Marxism) which was, ironically, to a certain extent a result of the actions of the officially Marxist Soviet establishment.

Henri Wagner (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France)

From Sahlins to Lévy-Bruhl: Mutuality and Participation

Lévy-Bruhl is famous for having characterized the ‘prelogical’ mode of thought by means of the notion of participation. Despite the fruitful use of this notion in anthropological works such as those by Leenhardt and Bastide, the radical criticisms of Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of prelogic formulated by Mauss, Evans-Pritchard and Lévi-Strauss seem to have relegated the metaphysical notion of participation to the prehistory of anthropology. However, in What Kinship is – and is not (2013), Marshall Sahlins has recently shown that the notion of participation could be rescued from theses criticisms and used to account for the reality of kinship relationships. Sahlins intends to show that the central feature of kinship would consist essentially in the recognition of the mutuality of being, so that the kinfolk are « are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another » (p. ix). In our talk, we would like to show that, first, Sahlins’s uses of the concept of mutuality is in line with Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participation inasmuch as it runs counter the traditional logic of individuality ; secondly, the concepts of participation and mutuality are used to define a third way to the traditional alternative between culturalism and naturalism ; thirdly, Sahlins’s use of the concept of participation should be read in light of his earlier book How ‘Natives’ Think, whose title explicitly referred to the English translation of Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures.

Jeremy Macclancy (Oxford Brookes University, UK)

Decolonisation: neither white nor black but hybrid, mixed-parentage. The case of Fernando Henriques, Jamaican anthropologist in UK academia

Decolonisers wish to expose, then excise colonialist structures girding past and present anthropology (Mogstad & Tse 2018; Jobson 2020). But some leading decolonisers over-simplify history seeing anthropology as an uneven contest between colonialist academics and silenced local intellectuals; they do not differentiate between colonialisms, but paint them all with the same brush (see, e.g. Commentaries on The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn 2020). This increasingly popular vision is as seductive as it is reductive. These decolonisers’ binary vision ignores both (1) White anthropologists who, from the very beginning of an institutional British anthropology in the late nineteenth century, campaigned in the field and the UK as activists for the cause of those they studied; and (2) non-White anthropologists who, while not revolutionaries, still acted as crucial intermediaries between White placeholders and Black radicals. Examining the work of anthropologists who fit either of these two groups helps to clarify histories of anthropology, and to query the overly stark positions of some decolonisers. Here I discuss one of the second group: a hitherto-ignored figure, Fernando Henriques, Jamaican anthropologist, who was President of the Oxford Union, first Black dean in UK academia, then director of a research centre in multi-racial studies. In the late 1950s and ’60s, he acted as a public intellectual, sometimes to notorious effect. Critical discussion of his life and achievements helps us question decolonisers’ portrayals of British anthropology. Too often these accounts rely too heavily on oversimplified, hegemonic versions of our recent past. Instead, scrutiny of Henriques’ career demonstrates more fully the rich range of positions within postwar UK departments. Can we characterise this approach as a path towards a hybrid history of anthropology, one which transcends conceptions of race, gesturing towards a history of anthropology of ‘mixed-parentage’?

Dong Ju Kim (School of Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST, Korea)

Charisma Revisited: Forgotten North American Inspirations and Theoretical Considerations

If charisma is not an explanation of behavior but an element or datum in analysis, as Worsley(1957) argued, in which ways and in which directions can we take the concept of charisma without abusing it? Is it possible to apply charisma in secular contexts without compromising its original, biblical connotations with the sacred? Reviewing the concept of charisma and locating its genealogy firmly within ethnographic tradition, T.O. Beidelman(1971) tried to position the concept between Weberian and Durkheimian traditions. Based on Evans-Pritchard’s account, Beidelman reconstructed Nuer priests and prophets as distinctive but not mutually exclusive, because prophets sought to routinize their charisma with institutional arrangements, whereas priests who inherited their position tried to justify their authority with proof of magical power. He emphasized the processual interplay between power and authority, combining a Durkheimian perspective on the role of inherited, professional positions of Nuer priests with a Weberian notion of charisma explaining the emergence of Nuer prophets. Based on these well-known ethnographically informed theoretical discussions on charisma, this paper aims to add to the concept a link with the Boasian tradition, represented by Leslie Spier, Frank Speck, Irving Hallowell, and Anthony Wallace, focusing on their accounts on North American prophets and millenarian dance movements. In the process of doing so, this paper will also engage with discussions on worldviews and ontology, rituals and iterability, as well as imitation and innovation.

Frauke Ahrens, Christiane Schwab (Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany)

We have always been (trans-)national? Folklore historiography on trial, 1875–1905

The historiography of folklore studies has been traditionally influenced by national narratives. Taking into account new approaches in the history of knowledge, however, it becomes necessary to investigate how transnational factors have shaped its development as well: To what extent have transnational processes contributed to the formation, professionalization, and systematization of folkloristic knowledge and practice? Is it possible to speak of transnational folklore research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? These thought-provoking questions are at the core of the research project titled ‘Actors ‒ Narratives ‒ Strategies: Constellations of Transnational Folklore Research, 1875‒1905’, funded by the German Research Foundation. The project examines ‘transnational folklore research’ as both a finding and an interpretative framework, to not only provide an initial and significant contribution to the transnational historiography of folklore studies but also reconsider the established narratives within disciplinary historiographies as well as the associated self-understandings. In our lecture, we will outline the foundational ideas and preliminary research that led to the development of this project. Additionally, we wish to discuss with other panel members the methodology and theoretical approaches we intend to employ, along with the specific questions and terminologies we plan to utilize to conceive and analyze ‘transnational folklore research’ from 1875 to 1905. Furthermore, we will address and explore the methodological and field-specific challenges that the project faces, offering potential solutions for overcoming them. By presenting our project, we hope to foster conversations about the transnational dimensions of folklore studies and its disciplinary history.

Dorina Arapi (Qendra e Studimeve dhe e Publikimeve për Arbëreshët, QSPA, Albania)

Anthropological insights for understanding traditional culture and its relation to the past legacies and its interpretations of the present

In my experience as an anthropologist, and during my researches about traditional culture, I have come across with two aspects that encouraged me to explore regarding the anthropology of tradition in Albania. During the socialist period in Albania (1945-1990), the political ideology impacted the communitarian collective memory, thus twisting its perception about the past and heritage. During the fieldwork, I have observed that local communities bear different points of view about their cultural past by articulating various perceptions, such as rejection, acceptance, distance or contestation. By exploring the archival records, “hidden and silent voices” (Zeitlyn: 2012) have emerged displaying unspoken realities thus leading to question what traditional culture is. On the other hand, the Albanian scholars, following the socialist politics, claimed that the study of culture and people were a matter of history, and ethnography was considered to be a historical discipline conceived under the interpretation and methodological framework of historical materialism. Various Albanian scholars defined culture with the term “popular culture”, arguing that culture emanated, used and consumed by the people. Between the terms “popular culture” and “traditional culture”, (the latter is what l stand for), it became natural and indispensable to inquire about anthropological knowledge production during Socialism in Albania, as well as on its legacy and impact on the people. Facing these two aspects, I have been focusing on inquiring about an anthropology of tradition in the Albanian case, which takes in consideration two subtopics that I intend to present in this paper: the first, the local community and cultural self-perception in front of the archival sources; and the second, the study of the traditional culture in its specific political context makes necessary an approach to a history of anthropological knowledge production. The triple perspective of anthropology as a field-based research, the archival data as a diachronic approach, and the exploration of how the anthropological knowledge is produced during totalitarian contexts, challenges the anthropologist to embrace new perspectives in analyzing culture and its relation to communities, anthropology and the role of the state in knowledge production.

Julio Andrés Camarillo Quesada (University Paris Cité, France)

Governmental Practices in Mexico: Their Anthropological Theories and Scientific Paradigms

Anthropology has found Mexico to be an intriguing fieldwork space, attracting many notable figures in the discipline. Moreover, the country has been a crucial context where anthropology became an auxiliary science for the government since the early 20th century, influencing national ideals, public and social policies. I explore the relationship between Mexican government’s indigenous policies and the succession of various anthropological schools and theories throughout the 20th century. These include Franz Boas’ culturalism, Bronisław Malinowski’s structuralism, and Julian H. Steward and Maurice Godelier’s multilineal evolutionism. The presentation aims to categorize the multitude of authors into scientific discursive blocks, or paradigms/epistemes. The first identified paradigm is evolutionism, which provided coherence to the nascent ethnology in the late 19th century. However, as it faced criticism and scrutiny, it gave way to systemism, focused on analyzing synchronic relationships within functional sets. Within the theory and practice of the Mexican indigenous institute, this transition can be observed in the adoption of the “intercultural systems” framework in the 1950s. This framework defined indigenous peoples based on their subordination to non-indigenous centers. In the 1970s, amidst vigorous national and international debates, the thesis of the transition from caste to class was rejected, challenging a fundamental aspect of institutional evolutionism. Consequently, a less invasive governmental approach emerged, emphasizing indigenous involvement as actors through self-management to overcome subordination and later through human capital logic to align with the economic system. This presentation offers, then, a history of anthropology that connects the specific Mexican case with broader scientific paradigms.

Michael Joalland (Sorbonne University, France)

Gerardus Vossius: an Early Modern forerunner of religious anthropology

In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius published a massive two-volume work titled De theologia gentili, et physiologia Christiana, i.e. “Of Pagan Theology and Christian Physics.” The 2,400 page-long treatise was the first scholarly attempt to list and classify all forms of nature worship known to his days. As Vossius scoured ancient sources, medieval chronicles, and travel accounts of travellers, merchants, and missionaries, he managed to set up a complete taxonomy of animistic beliefs and practices identified not only among ancient nations of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, but also among the Tartars, the Lithuanians, the Chinese, the Cannibas, the Guineans, the Incas, and many other peoples. Vossius thus successively described the worship of the sun, the moon, the planets, constellations, the four elements, quadrupeds, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, plants, meteors, metals, as well as heroes, virtues, and human artefacts. Convinced that all parts of nature had eventually been deified by men, the theologian framed a theory about the origin and propagation of the veneration of nature. No work of that scope has ever been attempted until George James Frazer published the first volume of his Worship of nature in 1926 – which ne never really completed. While Vossius’s treatise is known to historians of the Reformation, it has been largely ignored by anthropologists of religion. The aim of my presentation is therefore to describe the aim and content of Vossius’s magnum opus, and show that it rightly belongs to the field of religious anthropology.

Edward McDonald (Ethnosciences, Australia)

Memoirs serve as excellent types: C.R. Browne & the Ethnographical Survey of Ireland – An excluded ancestor and an invisible genealogy in the history of Anthropology

At various times in the late 1890s and early 1900s the reports of Charles Robert Browne’s ethnographic studies undertaken in the west of Ireland were described by several authorities as ‘exemplary ethnography’. Yet the Ethnographical Survey of Ireland on which Browne worked for a decade is largely forgotten in anthropology and if remembered, seen only as preliminary to the main business of A.C. Haddon’s anthropological career. It is also incorrectly understood as a mere adjunct to the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom. When it is discussed at all, typically only the initial work of Haddon and Browne on Aran is mentioned. Invariably the ongoing role of Haddon in the enterprise is exaggerated and Browne’s major contribution is totally marginalised. In this paper I explore the anthropological career of Charles Robert Browne, the only person to list his occupation in the 1901 census of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as ‘anthropologist’, albeit alongside his other profession: ‘general practitioner’. I argue, on the one hand, that the Ethnographical Survey of Ireland is part of an invisible genealogy in the development of modern professional anthropology, with Browne an excluded ancestor and, on the other, that the survey was part of an Imperial Science project that ultimately failed to take root in Ireland as the country moved to Independence.

Frédéric Saumade (Aix-Marseille University, France)

Was Frank Hamilton Cushing a Current Anthropologist?

Once considered as the first real participant observer in anthropology, after he spent more than four years among the Zuni Indian (New Mexico, 1879-1883), where he was initiated as a Chief by the Bow Priesthood, Frank H. Cushing, almost a self-taught ethnologist, was transformed into an Indian. Simultaneously, he experimented a practical and theoretical insight of the sociology of the clans, and the transformation of the material in the object production, that prefigured experimental archaeology, structuralism and cognitivism. Acknowledged as a genius by the masters of the classical French school, from Durkheim and Mauss to Lévi-Strauss, but criticized in the United States, and considered a traitor by the Zuni, whose secret knowledge he had divulged, he has since been barely considered a curiosity of the past and a mythomaniac, if not simply ignored. This paper, that reminds Cushing’s extraordinary story, and emphasizes its analyzes of Zuni’s manual concepts, pottery and copper works, proposes to show the extent to which the transformational logic that haunted Cushing, both his body and his mind, opens up theoretical perspectives on the topics of contemporary anthropology.

Vitalii Shchepanskyi (Center for the Study of Religion and Cross-Cultural Encounters, Rivne, Ukraine)

The Life and Work of Vasyl Denysenko: An Anthropologist’s Mimicry during the Stalinist Repression from the 1930s to the 1950s

Vasyl Denysenko (1896-1964) was a prominent Ukrainian historian and ethnographer associated with the academic school of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. His research focused on the material culture, rituals, and folklore of the Ukrainian, Khanty, and Nenets peoples. Denysenko received his education and worked under the mentorship of Hrushevsky in the Department of Primitive Culture and Folk Art at the Research Department of Ukrainian History. Unfortunately, the persecution of Ukrainian scholars hindered his ability to pursue a successful scientific career. From 1929 to 1933, historical institutions established by Hrushevsky witnessed the dissolution, leading to the arrest of many of Denysenko’s colleagues and fellow students. Remarkably, Denysenko was among the few who managed to survive the repressive Stalinist regime.

Marleen Metslaid (Estonian National Museum, Estonia)

Disciplanary history, writing and the question to inclusion. The example of Ivar Paulson

How to write disciplinary history? Whom to include, whom to exclude? We are writing a collective monograph on the history of Estonian ethnology and are planning to compile it through the researchers biographies. From the beginning, two separate disciplines have existed in Estonia – ethnology and folkloristics. The bounderies between them have not always been clear, and the research profiles of individual scholars have often included both disciplines or a grey area between them (religious studies, folk medicine). As a result of WW2, many researchers fled to the West, where they continued in their discipline, but often not on Estonian matters. All these aspects pose some problems when writing disciplinary history. in the paper, I will concentrate on ethnologist and religious scholar Ivar Paulson (1922-1966), who started his studies in Tartu but was forced to flee to Germany (1944), where he defended his dissertation in Hamburg in 1946. He later lived in Sweden where he managed to move thanks to fellow refugees, among them professor Gustav Ränk (1902-1998). Paulson worked in Stockholm as a renowed religious scholar. Pulson considered Ränk to be his teacher, even though he had only studied ethnology with the latter for a short time in Tartu. The difficult post-war years and a common interest in the folk religion bound them together. This is reflected in their frequent correspondance, kept in Ränks archive in Tartu. Should Paulson be included in the history of Estonian ethnology?

Margaret Crump (Independent researcher)

When ‘culture’ meant ‘growing things’: Countering anachronistic interpretations of James Cowles Prichard’s pre-paradigmatic anthropology

Historians have generally ignored or dismissed James Cowles Prichard’s contributions to the development of anthropology. Rather than tracing its history through this Briton’s early Victorian, discomfiting Christian monogenic, linguistic and human origin-focussed preoccupations, they have favoured tidier presentist, progressivist milestones like the first definition of culture or the promulgation of fieldwork, especially when the product of a compatriot. The bulk and range of Prichard’s anthropological output; misleadingly selective and superficial sampling of his views; often anachronistic comprehension of his nomenclature; dearth of biographical material; and neglect of cultural context have inhibited an historicist, comprehensive study of Prichard. A recent lecturer at the British Library on the anthropology of R. L. Stevenson emphatically stated “there was no anthropology before Tylor.” Further counting against Prichard in the realm of anachronistic historiography are: his distracting non-anthropological achievements and career as a physician connoting amateur anthropologist status; lack of university qualification or professorship in anthropology; his delegation of fieldwork to others; and his Christian bias. More subtle is assassination by linguistic anachronism. Because Prichard intended his terms ‘ethnology’ or the ‘science of man’ to comprise anthropology’s future four fields and he thus avoided ‘anthropology,’ he is misleadingly denominated a mere ethnologist. His volumes’ greater proportion of biological, geographical and linguistic over cultural and archaeological material rather reflects the formers’ greater availability at that time. Prichard’s failure to employ the term ‘culture’ prochronistically and his parachronistic use of ‘race’ have also led historians astray. This paper attempts an historical relativistic outline of Prichard and his anthropology.

Shivangi Kaushik (Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK)

Remembering and Re-Honouring Regina Gelana Twala and Ella Townsend

Regina Gelana Twala, a Zulu anthropologist was overshadowed throughout her entire life and died after a losing an arduous and brave fight with cancer. Her copious, meticulous collaborations and mediations honouring the people of Swahili were overshadowed (Cabrita 2023) by the gatekeepers of Western academia. Erna Brodber, a Jamaican author through the fictional character of Ella Townsend (Brodber, 1994) (Sharpe, 2020) tried to immortalize the contributions of Zora Neala Hurston, whose recent resurgence has redefined how anthropology positions and values ethnographic work carried out by women of colour. This paper then suggests that even though we pay homage and respect to our foremothers of anthropology, however the question that still remains is if these narratives act more than merely reminding us of structural inequalities and inhibitions that influence the production of anthropological knowledge today. How do we then untap the potential held by the narratives of our foremothers to understand gendered, racialized, sexed or ethnicized subjectivities as they emerge both within and outside of academia, today?

Lucie Rondeau du Noyer (CIRED, France)

Bridging the gap between economic anthropology and sociology of development: an overview of Hélène Legotien’s work at the SÉDÉS (1959–1975)

Hélène Legotien’s contribution to French social sciences is as unknown as her death is famous. While it is common knowledge that she was murdered by her husband Louis Althusser on November 16th 1980, the content of the work she produced as a researcher for the SÉDÉS – a private consulting firm set up by the French state in order to study and design development programs in newly-decolonized African states – has never been thoroughly investigated. Based on archival work and providing the first comprehensive bibliography of Legotien’s work as a social scientist, this paper focuses on the way in which Legotien engaged in the early seventies with the work of Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey. It especially shows that the goal of her report « on the internal and external structures of the traditional African agricultural economy » was twofold: extending young marxist and althusserian anthropologists’ theories on pre-capitalist societies by paying special attention to these societies’ means of reproduction and proposing concrete solutions to overcome the rural development crisis then underway in the formerly colonised countries. By studying both the sources and the reception of Legotien’s report, this paper ultimately qualifies the commonly-received view according to which, though politically radical and read by scholars worldwide, the French school of economic anthropology, did not have any impact on development policies and applied social sciences.

Ildiko Kristof (Hungarian Academy of Sciences / Eötvös Loránd Research Network, Hungary)

‘The Letters of the ‘Red-Skinned Man’s White-Skinned Mother-In-Law’ and Native American Anthropology in Austria-Hungary at the Turn of the 19th and the 20th Century

In the 1890s, newspapers in Budapest, Hungary published reports about the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation in South Dakota. These reports were in Hungarian and were written by an elderly woman from Vienna, Austria whose daughter married an Oglala Lakota. They met in 1890/91, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was touring Eastern Europe. The daughter’s mother accompanied the couple to the Pine Ridge Reservation in the United States and began writing personal – and far from romanticizing – reports back home for the Austro-Hungarian newspapers on the daily life of the Sioux. My presentation will analyse these reports in relation to the contexts – academic and popular – in which ethnographic-anthropological knowledge about the Native Americans could be gained in Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century. The letters of the ‘Red-Skinned Man’s White-Skinned Mother-In-Law’ offer a particular contrast both to the late-evolutionist, dry, measuring methodology of academic discourse and to the exoticizing world of the urban circuses and Völkerschauen. The letters of the mother-in-law offer a third approach based on internal, emic, meticulous observations focusing on the social and material conditions of life on the Sioux reservation after the Wounded Knee massacre (1890) and they convey it to the East-European readership of newspapers in Vienna and Budapest. I will argue that they should become an essential part of the history of anthropology of the region, from which they are still missing.

Antoine Leveque (Université Paris Cité, France)

Racial equality in early ethnological and anthropological institutions – two case studies in 19th century France

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea that all humans are biologically endowed with similar intellectual abilities is a consensual stance in scientific communities. The opposite was true in 19th century “white science”. When ethnology was first established as a discipline in France, it was defined as “the science of race” and helped push various colonial agendas. In this paper, we are going to look at the French case and study how the concept of racial equality was received in early ethnological and anthropological institutions. Two case studies will constitute the bulk of this paper. They represent some of the rare occurrences of racial equality in western science from 1750 to 1885. First, we will look at some lectures given by French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher at the Ethnological Society of Paris (ESP) during the late 1840’s. After a brief analysis of Schoelcher’s talks, we will see how the administrators of the ESP reacted to his thesis, according to which all ‘mankind’ is biologically equipped in the same way when it comes to intellectual abilities. Our second case study will focus on Anténor Firmin, a very dark-skinned Haitian intellectual and member of the Anthropological Society of Paris (ASP). Here, we will first see how he joined this learned society, which was then the most powerful exoteric center of racialist science in the world. Then, we will study how the ASP received his 1885 book titled ‘Of the equality of the Human Races’.

Angel Rojas (California State University, Fresno, US)

“Does honour to your natural good sense as well as to your acquired knowledge”: The Marginalization of Colonial Ethnobotanist Maria Riddell and the Intersection of Race and Science in the British Caribbean

During the late 18th century in the colonial Caribbean, Maria Riddell, an ethnobotanist, authored a manuscript that meticulously chronicled the natural histories of various islands such as Madeira, Leeward, St. Christopher’s, and Barbados. At the time, numerous intellectual discussions came into play that pushed the field of science into one focused on experimentation, observation, and application of theoretical knowledge. In addition to providing detailed genera and descriptions of plants and animals based on the Linnean and Pennant classification systems, she also made noteworthy observations about the culture and customs of Portuguese settlers in Madeira and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. Significantly, Riddell documented how these communities effectively utilized the resources discussed in her manuscript. Despite her remarkable contributions, her contemporaries marginalized her voice and only recognized her as a poet of the Romantic era. Her work in ethnography and cultural anthropology remained overshadowed by her male contemporaries, as societal norms limited her involvement in intellectual circles due to her gender. Although her correspondents admired and respected her knowledge, Riddell had to conform to prevailing societal tropes that undermined the significance of her ideas and insights. Riddell’s manuscript represents an early example of ethnographic literature that demonstrates the intersection of race, science, and gender by observing how people use nearby plants and animals as part of their diet and lifestyle. Her place in the history of anthropology highlights Riddell as an example of a woman who contributed to the development of the social sciences.

Anna Lesniewska (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland)

Don Eugenio? Discovering the figure of E. Frankowski

The aim of this paper is to present the figure of Eugeniusz Frankowski (1884–1962), a Polish ethnologist, museologist, and precursor of Iberian studies in Poland. The outbreak of the First World War found him in Spain, where – most likely for recreational purposes – he had been staying with his younger brother, Jan Frankowski (Tomicki 2022).

Petr Skalnik (Independent researcher)

With British Passport to the G.D.R. via Australia: Rehabilitating Frederick Rose´s contribution to anthropology

Frederick Rose (1915-1991) spent the last 35 years of his life in the German Democratic Republic and most of his anthropological work was published there. Born in Britain and trained in Cambridge, Rose chose social anthropology as his vocation. While his native Britain was entangled in an existential conflict with Hitler´s Germany, he emigrated to Australia and carried out his moonlighting fieldwork among the Northern Territory Warnindilyakwa Aborigines while earning his livelihood as a government employee. There he invented a new, much more reliable than hitherto, method of studying kinship and marriage. His work did not receive due recognition in his country of emigration. It was rewarded by academic employment and publication of his works only when he, by Cold War coincidence, emigrated for the second time, this time to the improbable German Democratic Republic. Although Australian authorities did not allow him to return to Arnhem Land, he repeatedly visited Australia from the G.D.R. and continued his studies in other locations. His dramatic life was described in detail in Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose by Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt (Wakefield Press 2015). His anthropology has yet to receive a fair evaluation. The proposed paper aims to begin rehabilitating the anthropologist Frederick Rose.

Mechthild Rutsch (National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico)

“Pues fácil no fue–y tampoco lo es ahora- esta vida doble: la política y la científica” (1935). Paul Kirchhoff’s strife between academia and politics

In my view, history of anthropology cannot dismiss its sociological aspects but also its political ones. It is precisely the latter ones that are of interest to me in Paul Kirchhoff`s (1900-1972) case, a German ethnohistorian whose contribution to Mexican anthropology was quite important, but whose political activities are still scarcely mentioned in the history of Mexican anthropology. This paper will explore precisely this aspect of his life and how it relates to his academic years of activity, up to 1939 when the Hitler regime stripped him of his nationality.

Ezequiel Grisendi (National University of Córdoba, Argentina)

A questioned percursor: Fernando M. Miranda

This paper proposes an intensive exploration of the career of Fernando Márquez Miranda, a figure that illuminates the contours of the disciplinary development of anthropology in Argentina and its ambiguous academic specialization between the 1930s and the late 1950s. The transition towards the university institutionalization of the discipline in Argentina had its deployment in the chair-institute-museum triad. Unlike some of his colleagues, Márquez Miranda had early access to university teaching and was inserted into academic management positions that shaped his professional options, especially as a “transmitter of tradition” rather than as an innovator with respect to it. His dedication to archaeological and historical research, between trips and archives, reinforced his institutional centrality rather than his prestige as a researcher. The analysis of Márquez Miranda’s professional and intellectual path allows us to listen to this differentiation process, which is not exempt from controversies and alliances, both intellectual and political. In turn, the text seeks to reposition the problem of the degree of disciplinary autonomy of the areas of development of Argentine anthropology mutually connected with its relationship with other sciences (social or natural) and with the variable interaction with international scientific reference spaces. Despite the prestige accumulated by Márquez Miranda as a member of Latin American and European academic societies, his position in Argentina was questioned for scientific reasons (representatives of neo-evolutionism or social anthropology contested his historicism) or for political reasons (Peronists and Marxists criticized his liberalism).

Nikola Balaš (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic)

The Myths of Origins: The Shifting Representations of Disciplinary Histories in socialist Czechoslovakia and post-socialist Czechia

Contemporary Czech ethnologist and anthropologist like to think in terms of a clear-cut and timeless distinction between Western sociocultural anthropology on the one hand and European ethnology on the other. To uphold this distinction, scholars of either disciplinary allegiance usually evoke the different historical-epistemological trajectories of the two disciplines. In my talk, I will argue that the distinction that contemporary Czech ethnologists and years. Beginning with the situation in the mid-twentieth century, I will focus on the shifting and competing representations of the relationship between the two disciplines. I will argue that the representations’ evolution in time was caused by the changing academic environment. Ultimately, I will point out certain paradoxes and suggest that especially the institutional conflicts in the past thirty years led to a serious misrepresentation of anthropology’s and ethnology’s disciplinary histories.

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

The history of anthropology allows the study of changing contexts: the role of Jorge Dias (1907-1973) in the Portuguese colonial field

This paper reflects on the ways of doing anthropology, or what was considered anthropology, in special contexts. Doing history of anthropology can also serve to understand historical changes and how different contexts influenced the production of knowledge. This happened, for example, in the period after the Second World War, when there was a change in studies carried out in the colonial context, especially in those that were based on racial criteria to identify, differentiate and hierarchize populations. These studies often resulted in exposing a civilizing scale, in which the colonizing White were at the top and the colonized Black were at the bottom. This differentiation, based on supposedly scientific criteria, could be one of the arguments used to justify colonization. The action of the Portuguese anthropologist Jorge Dias (1907-1973) contributed to a paradigm shift. Although he was sent on a scientific mission, financed by the government (between 1956 and 1960), whose objective was to study the Makonde in northern Mozambique, and he published part of the results of this mission, he also produced confidential reports in which he exposed the weaknesses of the colonial system. Inspired by the work of Rui Mateus Pereira, author of the posthumous book Anthropology at the service of Portuguese colonial policy in Mozambique (2021), this and other examples allow to argue that, although anthropology participated in the process of colonial domination, in the post-Second World War context the anthropologists also contributed significantly to colonial criticism and to important theoretical, conceptual, and methodological changes in anthropology.

Giuseppe Tateo (University of Bucharest, Romania)

Bringing Russian Formalism Back in the History of Social Anthropology

Here, I explore the bond between two intellectual paradigms that have more in common than we used to think: Russian formalism—in the shape of Viktor Shklovsky’s “enstrangement” technique in literary theory—and ethnographic theory as conceived by Bronislaw Malinowski. Inspired by the winds of change of modernist Europe, they were both elaborating a new narrative device: Shklovsky built his enstrangement technique on Tolstoy’s descriptive style; Malinowski introduced a new set of rules of ethnographic theory and practice through an unprecedented literary genre, the ethnographic monograph. While the relationship between structural anthropology and structural linguistics has received considerable scholarly attention, it seems that no one has yet tried to investigate systematically the common roots of Russian formalism and modern British social anthropology, as they both took shape in Europe in the 1920s. The complete absence of Russian formalism in the family tree of European social anthropology is ironic, since structuralist theory—which owes much to formalism—was by contrast a privileged interlocutor of our discipline. This paper brings into discussion this specific gap in the history of social anthropology. It reconstructs the history of formalism and ethnographic theory, introducing two main elements that they have in common: their academic ancestors and the kind of scientific endeavour they pursued. The likeness between their respective scientific endeavours poses an immediate question: why is Russian formalism left out when anthropologists reconstruct their disciplinary kinship diagram?

Miloš Milenković (University of Belgrade, Serbia), Marko Pišev (University of Belgrade, Serbia)

Ethnology as “national science” in Serbia: some useful lessons from the past

The dominant registers for discussing identity-based social and political issues in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe are “nationalism,” “multiculturalism,” “post socialism,” and “transition.” Instead of seeking solutions within these debates, we shift our focus to examining the discipline’s history, specifically the concept of the “anthropologization of ethnology” in Serbia. Namely, in the past four decades, Serbian anthropology has undergone significant changes in theories, methodologies and themes, which have not been widely acknowledged by the public. This lack of public awareness can be, paradoxically, considered useful in terms of the discipline’s politics. As the region experiences retraditionalization after a brief period of democratic progress, the traditional image of ethnology – as a “national science” supplied with a “toolkit” for safeguarding collective identity – can become a practical instrument for achieving anthropological means. This Ketman-like maneuver presents an opportunity for contemporary Serbian anthropology facing retraditionalist and fundamentalist social trends to advance a cultural critique by operating from an ethnological niche – and thus securing its social legitimacy. One of the possible pathways to achieve this twofold goal is the disciplinary engagement with UNESCO’s concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), which can, arguably, be employed as a reconciliation rather than conflict provoking platform for negotiating the cultural politics in Western Balkans, as well as in the other post-conflict regions.

Elsie Mégret (EHESS, France)

Ages, genders and figures: anthropometric tools in developmental medicine during the early 20th century

Based on an ongoing doctoral thesis that examines the medical production of anorexia during the third French republic, this paper aims to highlight the circulation of anthropology knowledge in paediatric and child medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the 19th century, hygienists and doctors have employed anthropometric tools to produce growth standards and establish biological law of development. Growth is conceptualized as a process punctuated by bodily and physiological changes. Graphs, figures, and numerical data play a crucial role in the production and the circulation of these growth standards that are considered to be different for men and women. Based on articles and anthropometric figures dating from 1913 to 1935 and published in the French journals La pédiatrie pratique and the Bulletin de la société d’anthropologie de Paris et de Lyon, I’ll question links between the numbered writing of the body and the normalization of age. Specifically, I’ll investigate how the normalization of biological age contributes to the naturalization of gender. Furthermore, I’ll explore how anthropological knowledge, particularly pertaining to environment and diet, was employed in the field of developmental medicine in the early twentieth century to analyse human beings and their bodily development. This paper will propose an anthropological exploration of the bodily construction of biological age. It’ll challenge the conventional dichotomy between biological age and social age, as well as explore how age anthropology can improve our understanding of contemporary use of anthropometric tools such as BMI or growth curves.

Erik Petschelies (University of Sao Paulo, Brasil)

Whose line is it anyway? Examples of Collaboration and Hiddenness in the History of South American Ethnology

At a meeting of a research group, a Brazilian anthropologist stated provocatively that acknowledging the importance of native collaborators is something anthropologists have been doing for a while. He might be right: Carlos Castaneda described his relation to his informant and teacher Don Juan back in the in the 1960s. However, do historians of anthropology recognize the importance of indigenous collaborators in the construction of past anthropological knowledge? In this presentation I intend to discuss two cases in the history of South American indigenous ethnology. Firstly, the contribution of Antonio Bakairi to the work of Karl von den Steinen. Antônio accompanied von den Steinen during his two field trips to the Xingu River basin in the 1880s. He wrote a book about the Bakairi language, that consists of interlinear translations from phrases said by Antônio. The second case is that of José-Mayuluaípu, a Pemon man, who told Theodor Koch-Grünberg myths during his expedition in 1911-1913, that were later gathered in his work Vom Roraima zum Orinoco, upon which the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade based his modernist book Macunaíma. I conclude that although both anthropologists recognized the importance of their collaborators, this has been erased over the years, in an historical process that melts the lines of anthropologist and collaborators, leaving public recognition only for the scientist, hiding the indigenous contribution. At the end, I will expose a few examples from archive research in São Paulo, that can shed light on the entanglement between history of indigenous peoples and of science.

Roberto Campbell (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile)

Juan Martín Collío: A Hidden Cultural Broker in Mapuche Studies

Not just anyone can become a cultural broker. It requires a unique combination of personal and structural conditions. One individual who exemplifies this is Juan Martín Collío (1898-1990), a Mapuche native from southern Chile. The Mapuche people maintained their political autonomy for over 300 years, first from Spain and later from Chile. However, this changed in the late 19th century when Chile conquered their territory and confined the Mapuche to reservations. Collío was born into a world with different actors, rules, and opportunities. In this context, Collío played a significant role in the first half of the 20th century, engaging in public debates about the integration of the Mapuche into Chilean society and contributing to the emerging field of anthropological studies focused on the Mapuche people. Remarkably, he successfully established connections, shared information, and formed friendships with a wide network of renowned US anthropologists, including Boas, Speck, Hallowell, Tantaquidgeon, Farabee, Titiev, and Brand. However, it is worth noting that none of these anthropologists are primarily associated with research on southern South America. This fact, combined with the disconnection between the academic circles in Chile and the United States, has likely hindered the recognition of Collío’s significant contributions to the history of Mapuche studies, even until today.

Sjoerd Kompier (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

Johannes Salilah (1898-1985): western research and Dayak interests

From 1935 until the 1980s, the Ngaju-Dayak Johannes Salilah (1898-1985) from Borneo shared his knowledge of Ngaju-medicine, religion, cosmology, language and customary law with a diverse group of European and American researchers. Although being recognized in the titles, prefaces and footnotes of the resulting publications, he remained ‘hidden’ within the global hierarchy of knowledge production. By centring Salilah’s experiences, this paper follows a growing body of literature which sheds light on the roles of local interlocutors within the history of anthropology. In doing so, it goes beyond describing and recognizing Salilah’s scholarly contributions by asking why Salilah participated in these processes of knowledge production and which forces shaped his involvement. The influence of Dutch colonialism on Central-Kalimantan intensified in the late nineteenth century, which catalysed a range of societal transitions in Ngaju-Dayak society. The colonial government enforced her own legal and bureaucratic order and the accompanying societal hierarchies posed both challenges and opportunities for Ngaju-Dayaks such as Salilah. Additionally, the protestant mission spread its religious notions and introduced Euro-American medical practices and education as a tool of conversion. In postcolonial Indonesia, the Ngaju-Dayak remained a marginalized group, whose (self-proclaimed) representatives laboured for political, religious and cultural acceptance and recognition. This paper argues that Salilah’s participation in the abovementioned processes of knowledge production formed a part of his strategy of facing these societal transitions. Both in colonial and postcolonial times, Salilah was able to grasp opportunities to further both his own interests and those of Ngaju-Dayak communities.

Enzo Hamel (University of East Anglia, UK)

The men behind the notion of eidos: photography and “hidden” Indigenous contributions in Gregory Bateson’s anthropology

In 1936, Gregory Bateson published the book Naven as the result of his ethnographic research among the Iatmul communities in the East Sepik Province of what is now known as Papua New Guinea. While this work and its theoretical contribution specifically around the notions of ethos, eidos and schismogenesis have been discussed in relation to important figures of British social and American cultural anthropology such as Margaret Mead or Alfred C. Haddon, the central contributions of Indigenous collaborators have often been eluded in the history of anthropology. Drawing on Bateson’s photographic collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (UK), this paper examines the specificities of the photographic medium in providing a space for recovering and acknowledging these Indigenous contributions. Through the cross-reading of archival photography and field notes, I will explore the Indigenous agencies in these ethnographic encounters. Following this approach, I will present the field as a place of negotiations in which knowledge and images can be seen as coproduced. I will discuss the involvement of Iatmul men in the daily context of ethnography and will particularly highlight the central role of Malikindjin in the definition of the Iatmul eidos, Bateson’s core concept defined as “the expression of the standardised cognitive aspects of the individuals” (1936: 33). From this perspective, this paper aims at decentring this part of the history of anthropology and include the voices of Bateson’s Indigenous collaborators who are at the core of his understanding of Iatmul culture and his theoretical contribution.

Pier Paolo Viazzo (University of Turin, Italy)

Encounters, missed encounters and avoidances in the anthropological study of southern Europe

There is no reason to doubt that the relationships between the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ anthropologists who worked in southern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and ‘native’ scholars were often strained. However, we should be weary of easy generalizations that lump together the different settings, and the different times, in which encounters did or did not occur. Deliberate avoidances should be distinguished from accidentally missed encounters, and we cannot ignore that cases of possibly difficult but ultimately successful encounters are attested. The aim of the proposed paper is to reassess these relationships by comparatively exploring the histories of two southern European research fields, namely Alpine anthropology and Mediterranean(ist) anthropology. There is a general feeling that relations were less strained in the Alps than in Spain, Portugal and southern Italy, but this hunch needs to be substantiated and, if correct, to be explained and articulated. And so are variations from one scholarly and socio-political context to another and over time. Two other neglected issues the paper will try to address are, on the one hand, the effects that different attitudes to the presence of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ethnographers and their methods had within ‘native’ anthropologies; and, on the other, the relationships that existed and still (mostly posthumously) exist between Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, the works they published and the communities they studied.

Caleb Shelburne (Harvard University, US)

The Present and Past of Teaching History of Anthropology: The HAR Syllabus Project

The History of Anthropology Review has recently created a new online collection of syllabi in fields related to its topics. Building on HAR’s other work to promote scholarship and collaboration in the history of anthropology, the new syllabus collection will both broach new topics around pedagogy and offer further resources to exploring the history of our field. In particular, the collection is intended to bring attention to the crucial but often unappreciated work of syllabus writing by highlighting especially innovative or topical approaches featured in our collection. This presentation will discuss the value of the syllabus collection to the field, highlighting how reading syllabi can promote conversations on such pressing topics as the value of historical study for anthropologists, the relevance of our field to current political events, and new approaches to ‘decolonizing’ syllabi. Finally, I will describe how this collection will be used to study the history of our field itself, including the emergence of different ‘schools’ of thought, the rise and fall of canonical texts, and the influence of changes in higher education and our society on teaching the history of anthropology.

Joshua Smith (Independent Scholar, Canada)

Action Anthropology as Decolonial Pedagogy: HOA as Educational Praxis

The History of Anthropology (HOA) as a specialization and a relatively marginalized sub-field of anthropology continues to hold immense potential in directly taking on the contemporary challenges of decolonizing education and schools, not merely of anthropology as a discipline, community, and endeavour, but quite directly the systems and relations of our everyday lives and institutions. This presentation outlines the framework of the pedagogical theory and praxis that is at the core of action anthropology as a cogent example of how HOA, when understand as a vehicle for educational transformation (not merely for universities, but especially in grade school and community programming), is well suited in decolonizing, rethinking and re-imagining teaching and learning. Specially, personal success and examples are discussed in my own approaches to teaching the new English First Peoples curriculum in British Columbia with emphasis on the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Herbert Lewis (University of Wisconsin, US)

A Historicist versus a presentist view of American anthropology and colonialism

In 2023 it is not only taken as certain among American anthropologists that their field was and probably still is complicit with colonialism. A professor at a major university just claimed (6/30/23) “Anthropology carries into the present inexorable and bloody traces of the past. Can the discipline be divested of its entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, imperialism, and civilizational discourse?” The panel organizers ask, “Are there other important uses for historical research?” This paper asks, “What is the use of the historiography of anthropology if 50 years of such writing has had so little impact on the popular mind of today’s anthropologists.

Jessica Taylor (American Council of Learned Societies, US)

Work and the work: Anthropology outside tenure in the US in the 1920s and 30s

In 2019, only 54% of those completing a PhD in anthropology at US schools had a definite commitment for employment, with 18% going on to postdoctoral positions and 18% to academic employment (Survey of Earned Doctorates, NSF). The question of precarious employment in anthropology has been an important topic of conversation in American and Canadian anthropology for the past 15 years. This paper considers how the work (that is the theory, methods, and knowledge) of anthropology is connected with the work (that is employment) of anthropology through the lens of American scholars working in the 1920s and 30s not employed in faculty positions. Whose knowledge-production made it into the shape of the field then, and whose did not? Racism shaped the pathway of Louis Eugene King, who (as discussed by Harrison 1999) went from unemployment to a government junior historian position to employment at the Naval Supply Depot. Zora Neale Hurston worked across many jobs, and had her ethnographic research in the 1930s funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, yet has been being recovered since the 1970s, including in anthropology (see for instance, Freeman Marshall 2023). This paper takes the histories of employment for these scholars (and others at the time) and uses them as provocations to consider how we structure who is contributing to the work of anthropology today, drawing on my own position as a researcher in non-profits examining career trajectories and disciplinary commitments in the humanities and social sciences more generally.

Amy Woodson-Boulton (Loyola Marymount University, US)

Disseminating Anthropology in Imperial Britain and now

Thomas Hylland Eriksen has recently argued that “broader dissemination, popularization and making a social impact have not been given priority in academic anthropology after the Second World War; the urgency of climate change has to be understood as an unequivocal call to arms” (Anthropology Today, 2020). My paper connects anthropology’s potential current role in shaping popular narratives on climate change to earlier, very successful attempts to disseminate anthropological knowledge. At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon at the Horniman Museum in London tried to make ethnographic collections educational for a wide public by using them to illustrate socio-cultural evolution, according to which human societies “develop” through technological innovation alone. Their new museum techniques turned objects from other cultures into a metanarrative that offered an apparently scientific explanation for British exceptionalism: the “rise of the West” without Empire. Combined with outreach, lectures, and school trips, the narrative of unilinear stadial evolution through invention helped to raise generations of visitors to think of Britain as a powerful imperial and industrial nation not through colonial conquest and extraction, the transatlantic slave trade, great geographical luck, or imposing favorable trade systems through violence, but through technical (and sometimes explicitly racial) superiority. Such myths are surprisingly persistent and still form a key barrier to action on climate justice, occluding historical explanations for differentials in global wealth and development. The creation of these clear educational narratives offers a compelling model and rationale for anthropologists’ climate action, undoing their own past success.