Invidious Comparison
Graham M. Jones Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy University of Chicago Press, 2017 240 pp., 25 halftones, notes, bibl., index Editor’s note: This essay was origin…
Tag: Field notes
Mário de Andrade, Modernism, and Brazilian Anthropology
Semana de Arte Moderna Poster, São Paulo, 1922 This year marks the centenary of São Paulo’s 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art).[1]Funding for this article…
“Orientalism alla Turca”: Evolutionary Desires, Imperial Nostalgias, and Western Anxieties in Ahmed Midhat’s Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân
Introduction On November 15, 1889,[1] Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912), a prolific Ottoman journalist and novelist, announced in his newspaper Tercümân–i Hakîkât (Interprete…
Activating the Torres Strait Archive: An Interview with Anita Herle and Jude Philp on Recording Kastom
We at HAR were very excited to learn about the recent publication of Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898.…
Special Focus: Structures
In the course of the twentieth century, structure became a central category of thought across a wide array of sciences. From linguistics to anthropology, psychoanalysis and history, the epistemic ai…
Girls, Gadgets, and Gatekeepers: What is Ethical Feminist Fieldwork When Working with Children?
There is no Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent body in India. The ethics of research are left to the purview of researchers, their supervisors, and departments. Therefore,…
Special Focus: Engaging ‘The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology’
Why have Black ancestors been largely excluded from anthropology’s intellectual history and canon? In this series of pieces, Tracie Canada engages the authors of the 2018 volume The…
Bernhard J. Stern, an American Apologist for Stalinism
The June 1944 issue of the American Sociological Review featured an article by Bernhard J. Stern entitled “Soviet Policy on National Minorities” (Stern 1944). In it the author argued that…
Special Focus: The Morton Cranial Collection and Legacies of Scientific Racism in Museums
Pressures in and outside the academy are forcing museums to grapple ever more deeply with the legacies of scientific racism embedded and embodied in their anthropological collections. The…
The One-Two Punch
One hundred and nine years ago, The New York Times ran a full-page overview of Franz Boas’s recently published book, The Mind of Primitive Man. [1] The headline…
The Peripeteia of The Gift: Gift Exchange by Grégoire Mallard
Grégoire Mallard. Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea. xi + 293pp., notes, bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Is there a more celebrated and…
Boas in the Age of BLM and Idle No More: Re-Evaluating the Boasian Legacy
This extended review is a collaboration between the Reviews and Field Notes sections of HAR. Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L. A. Hancock, and Joshua Smith (editors). The…
Conferences as Ecologies of Ideas: Epistemic Cultures of the Association for Social Anthropology of Oceania
A considerable portion of scholarly life is bound up with meetings of various kinds. For those located within academic institutions, office hours, departmental meetings, and university committees pl…
Women of the Powell Expeditions: The Contributions of Emma Powell and Ellen Powell Thompson
Major John Wesley Powell is a prominent figure in the history of American anthropology and probably best known to HAR readers as the founder of the Smithsonian’s Bureau…
Faustian Bargains: The Legends and Legacies of German “Liberal Ethnology”
This extended review is a collaboration between the Reviews and Field Notes sections of HAR. H. Glenn Penny. Im Schatten Humboldts. Eine tragische Geschichte der deutschen Ethnologie. Munich:…
Decolonizing or Recolonizing? The (Mis)Representation of Humanity in Natural History Museums
Every Indigenous Peoples’ Day since 2016, members of the activist group Decolonize This Place have gathered at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City,…
UNDERTONES: Leiris, Lévi-Strauss and Opera
By Jean Jamin Translated by Simon Torracinta Editors’ note: The editors of the History of Anthropology Review are delighted to publish this essay by Jean Jamin. As readers…
The Inspiration for the History of Anthropology Newsletter
A few years ago when the History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN) relaunched as an online publication, a number of articles described how it was started by George Stocking in 1973. Mo…
Special Focus: Canguilhem’s Milieu Today
Canguilhem’s historical epistemology continues to inspire historians and anthropologists to attend to how current and former human practices of science shape our conceptualizations and engagement wi…
Special Focus: História dos Índios no Brasil Dossiê
This dossier features seven of the forty papers presented at the colloquium 25 anos de História dos Índios no Brasil: balanços e perspectivas da história indígena. The event…
Can Humanity be Mapped? Adolf Bastian, Friedrich Ratzel and the Cartography of Culture
Introduction: Image and Science in Early Ethnology During the second half of the nineteenth century, in German circles linked to anthropology, a movement of scientific systematization arose from…
“Laying the Cards on the Table”
Michel Leiris. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Africa List Series. 720 pp., 37 halftones, 3 fascimiles, 1 map. Calcutta, London, and New York: Seagull Books, 2017.…
Living Monuments: Imagining Ancient Gene Pools in the Middle East
In 1927, the Polish-Jewish physical anthropologist Henryk Szpidbaum published an account of his recent expedition to Mandate Palestine on behalf of the Polish Society for the Exploration of…
Fear and Loathing in Atlanta
Content warning: racism, violence, mention of miscarriage. I was on my way to the airplane that would take me back home, to Canada. I boarded the train between…