History of Anthropology

 
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.