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While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to "map the margins" (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Klaus Neumann's critical approach to Pacific history which attends to the 'trash' of the past – 'the irrelevant, the insignificant, the marginal, and the negligible' – this paper revisits the margins of our sources. Captions, doodles, annotations and other forms of marginal trash need to be addressed in their own right, and for the light they shed on the main body of source materials, whether textual, audio-visual, or artefactual. The folio drawings produced by the Russian anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay in Oceania between 1871 and 1883 provide an exemplary if fragmentary archive through which the interplay of the central and the marginal, the visual and the textual, can be considered. The visual richness of his sketches and the scope for historical and ethnographic analysis and reconstruction are considerably enhanced and extended by focusing on his many marginal scribbles, which include obvious captions as well as stray observations, word-lists, and other commentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the notions of 'ruins', 'savage knowledge', and 'American race' in the works of the German naturalist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868). A somewhat neglected figure in the history of anthropology and of natural history, Martius was regarded by scholars from Europe and the Americas as a leading figure in botany and ethnology in the nineteenth century. In this article, I discuss how Martius articulated: (1) the notion of American race, that is, a broad characterization of the native peoples of the Americas rooted in a complex natural history which brought together seemingly disparate fields of knowledge, such as medicine, botany, theology, philology, and mythology; (2) having ruins as a guiding concept, which helped him to make sense of American natives; and (3) savage knowledge – a concept semantically aligned to that of ruins, and among whose principal modes of expression was shamanic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an approach for working with vernacular texts in ethnographic archives. It examines Dinka song texts collected in (South) Sudan by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (between 1947 and 1951), now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Songs were central to developing Lienhardt's ethnographic analysis; they are also an exciting and unique record of popular and artistic expression at the time of his research. The songs he transcribed offer perspectives on life under colonial rule that are often occluded in the documentary and ethnographic record (including Lienhardt's own writing). In this article, I examine a selection of songs, showing that to be understood today they must be seen as both a product of Lienhardt's data collecting practices and works of art in their own right. It is possible to usefully recontextualize these songs by triangulating between Lienhardt's published work, his unpublished field notes and other academic studies in South Sudanese history and anthropology. Importantly, these songs must be treated as verbal arts – and read with an appreciation of their aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Their meaning and significance is not always straightforward, in fact they are often deliberately opaque. Any interpretation must embrace these 'difficult' aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the reader to the hitherto hardly noticed ethnographic work of the renowned Prussian intellectual und politician Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt is best known for his theoretical contributions to various fields of study, including anthropology and liberalism. Complementing this predominant view, the article focuses on Humboldt's observations during his travels and stays abroad, thus showing that he also conducted empirical research. Humboldt's accounts of the French, Spaniards, and Basques are interpreted against the background of his liberal anthropology. In this way, the article shows that Humboldt gained new anthropological insights through ethnographic research, especially about liberal constitutions and the connections between body and mind, and between individual and community. This new look at Humboldt's anthropological work also throws a light on the relationship between anthropology and liberalism, which is often regarded as problematic in more recent publications. The article thus contributes not only to the history of anthropology, but also to current discussions on the crisis of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In approaching history as a site of scholarly analysis and activist praxis, the papers in this volume open up new ways to think ethnographic and archival methods together. This afterword considers how these activist ethnographic representations work as part of the ethical and analytic commitments of contemporary anthropology more broadly. I ask what possibilities are opened when we as scholars think with other people's struggles. Such dialogic encounter is a way in which activist anthropologies create possibilities for new imaginative frontiers and shared projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article scrutinizes ethnographic representation or art through the views of philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Topics discussed include Herder's role as in the foundation of the history of anthropology, his views on visual anthropology, and his critical remarks on works of artists including Theodore de Bry and Sydney Parkinson.

The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

S. M. Shirokogoroff’s bookSocial Organization of the Northern Tunguswas originally published in 1929 in English and later also in Chinese and Japanese languages. It is striking that this monograph has still not been published in Russian. It contains rich ethnographic data on Evenki kin relations, family organization, property relations, and various customs regulating social life. This text demonstrates how ethnographic data are translated into a theory. Compared to the Russian texts of the same period, S. M. Shirokogoroff’s writings were free from Soviet ideological frames. This article discusses the historical and ideological contexts, in which Alexsandr Nikolaevich Gorlin (1878–1939), a literary translator, worked on the Russian translation of S. M. Shirokogoroff’s book in the 1930s, as well as the challenges that the contemporary readers and academic editors of the translation face. It shows that the translation process itself and translation versions are intriguing objects of anthropological research, as they illustrate the temporal dimension of the academic language and facilitate our understanding and interpretation of diverse processes that molded the indigenous peoples’ image in the early Soviet science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this review, I examine the contribution of social anthropology to the study of risk. I define social anthropology as the study of ‘other cultures’ and note that such studies have a long history, for example the Greeks and Romans were interested in exploring and understanding ‘barbarians’ and using such studies to reflect on their own society. However, in the early twentieth century, with the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits and Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, the study of other cultures shifted from an assumption of western cultural superiority to respect for other cultures with anthropologists seeking to understand and explain the unique logic and rationality of different cultures. This new approach to other cultures tended to stress the universality of the challenges which societies face while documenting their unique responses. Thus, all societies have to cope with uncertainty, the essential unpredictability of the future and account for past misfortunes. In western societies, risk now plays a central role in making the future more predictable and manageable and enabling the forensic investigation of the past. For example, in the area of health, epidemiologists map the incidence of disease and their spatial, temporal and social distribution providing a way of predicting and preventing future incidence. In other cultures, various forms of divination and ritual activity perform the same function. For example, Malinowski identified the importance of dangerous long sea journeys for the Trobriand Islanders and examined the ways in which they sought to deal with these dangers through a combination of technical skill and magic. Douglas used historical and anthropological evidence to develop a cultural theory of risk. She argued that the nature of social relations in a group influenced which hazards that group chose to highlight and sought to counteract, and how they chose to do this. Although it is possible to identify issues of risk and uncertainty in anthropological studies, it has not been a central or major theme and the contribution of anthropology to risk studies has been more limited than the contribution of disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Part of the problem relates to globalisation. The development of anthropology as a mature discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, one which respected other cultures, coincided with the peak of European colonisation. While social anthropologists wanted to explore and understand ‘pristine’ pre-modern cultures, the reality was that these cultures were already being reshaped by European institutions such as hospitals and medicine. In terms of uncertainty, this means that pre-modern systems of predicting and managing the future, such as oracle and magic, coexist and compete with global systems such as risk-based medicine. It is possible to recover and reconstruct such pre-modern systems by using historical sources. However, most contemporary ethnographies must take into account competing systems and how individuals choose and move between them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ethnographic revisits have become an increasing practice in the social sciences, designed to advance the understanding of history through the linking of micro processes and societal structures. In this article I revisit my study of Zambianisation on the Copperbelt, conducted between 1968 and 1972. The methodology of the extended case method is used first to re-present the original study and then to reassess it critically in terms of what has happened over the last 40 years. Four types of revisit are considered: revisit as refutation of the original study, revisit as an approach to historical change, revisit as comparative analysis, and revisit as reconstructing social theory. My reassessment relies on other studies of the Zambian mines, but also on ethnographic research I conducted in the US, Hungary and Russia during the same 40-year period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay explores the curious absence of Middle Ages from the history of anthropological thought. An investigation of disciplinary histories reveals while anthropology's intellectual origins are often traced to early modernity or classical antiquity, the existence of authentic anthropological inquiry in medieval Europe has been either disregarded or explicitly denied. This historical lacuna is the product of an unexamined temporal logic that presupposes an epistemological rupture between the medieval and modern worlds. This essay challenges several historical myths that have underwritten the erasure of the discipline's medieval legacies, and then outlines the necessity of reintegrating the Middle Ages in anthropology's intellectual genealogy not only for enriching our understanding of pre-professional anthropology, but also for constructing a more holistic and inclusive understanding of the anthropological project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on Callon's [2005. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller's Critique of The Laws of the Markets.”Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter6 (2): 3–20] concept of agencement, together with Latour's [1987.Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] concept of immutable combinable mobiles to illustrate how Henry Devenish Skinner, ethnologist and anthropology lecturer at the Otago Museum and University sought to form and shape Māori identity, history, culture and populations as subjects of liberal government. It does this through an exploration of Skinner's fieldwork and collecting practices. The paper suggests that forms of analysis mediated through the American History School, and the culture area concept were deployed during the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in New Zealand (between 1919 and 1940) to produce ethnographic authority that then acted as a point of connection between scientific networks and the colonial administrative field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1860s the sciences relating to human diversity were undergoing significant intellectual and methodological changes. The older generation of practitioners including James Cowles Prichard, Thomas Hodgkin and John Crawfurd were slowly passing away. Recognising that there was an opportunity to take a leading role in reforming the study of human variation, two competing intellectual camps vied for control of the nascent discipline; anthropologists led by James Hunt, and ethnologists led by Thomas Huxley. Taking their observational practices and vocational strategies as its starting point, this paper seeks to expand our understanding of the debates surrounding British race studies during the 1860s. In doing so, this paper takes seriously Hunt and Huxley's self-descriptions as scientific reformers. Both of these figures promoted strategies for transforming the sciences relating to human diversity. Each believed they were strengthening anthropology and ethnology's best aspects and dispensing with their weakest. Moreover, their training in natural history, anatomy and physiology can be seen to have influenced their observational practices when it came to identifying and classifying human varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We now expect that an anthropologist's temperament and life experience, including personal and academic relationships with key informants, shape at least to a degree that person's scholarly interest and writing. Geoffrey Gorer and François (Féral) Benga, whose lives crosscut those of a number of leading intellectual and artistic figures of interwar Britain, France, and the USA, offer one example of how ethnographic partnership may come to shape a corner or two of disciplinal history. In 1934, before Margaret Mead encouraged his anthropological career, Gorer toured West Africa with Benga who had come to France from Senegal to perform in the Folies Bergères. Gorer [(1935. Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knoft)] published an account of their travels as Africa Dances. This collaboration would shape Gorer's subsequent contributions to the broader contours of culture and personality theory and national character study before and after World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the interrelationships, historically and culturally, between ethnography, silence, torture and knowledge. As a key methodology for anthropology, and increasingly other academic disciplines, ethnography has also become a broader cultural value. In the context of the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline the epistemology implicit in ethnography is discussed with reference to he cultural meanings of silence and of torture. The influences of Classical and Enlightenment ideas of the foundation of truth in agonistic performance on modernist science and social research provide a context for discerning the pragmatic convergence between ethnography and torture, especially in recent attempt to weaponize culture and recruit social scientists to military counter-insurgency campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Italian nineteenth-century ethnographic fascination with regional folklore was a phenomenon linked, in part, to the country's unification. As Italians sought to define their new kingdom, popular and scholarly studies emerged on the peninsula's indigenous regional traditions. Although valuable for cultural preservation, such investigations reinforced stereotypes regarding the ‘backwards’ or ‘barbaric’ nature of Italy's poorer areas, many of them in the Meridione. This article investigates late-nineteenth-century constructions of ‘primitive’ social fictions about Sicily – that positioned the region as the ‘other’ Africa – through an exploration of the ethno-anthropological work of Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), and, in particular, his Mostra Etnografica Siciliana at Palermo's 1891–2 Esposizione Nazionale. Sicily's historical engagement with Arab culture and its geographical and cultural proximity to Africa are a backdrop for this study. The related, often derogatory, analogy between Sicily and Africa are also considered in the context of Italy's vainglorious colonial ventures in east Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controversy, and these concerns persisted into a second generation as evolutionism was marginalized and prehistoric archaeology matured. Although the eolith debate finally floundered in the debris of the “epistemic rupture” between the world of Victorian evolutionism and late twentieth-century anthropology, some of its technical pre-occupations—particularly in relation to what we would now call ethnographic analogies and in terms of the techniques for distinguishing artefacts from geofacts—persist and are very much current issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the time that Julian Steward was formulating the Puerto Rico Project, several other approaches to complex societies were being pursued by American anthropologists. Beginning in the 1920s, funders'—and subsequently, New Deal agencies'—interest in addressing social problems impelled microcosmic community studies in the United States. That approach, essentially functionalist and ahistorical, was extended to village studies in other countries, and Redfield's folk-urban continuum became the dominant theoretical framework for comprehending regions within nations. Concurrently, acculturation theory legitimized anthropological interests beyond “primitives” and offered an alternative, two-way cultural contact model. With the onset of World War II, the culture and personality approach was applied to strategic nations, providing holistic configurational depictions of national character. Steward's effort can be seen as a critique of, and alternative to, these approaches that were prevalent in the late 1940s. Building upon his method of cultural ecology, his orientation toward work, and his notions about sociocultural integration, he devised a different way of studying a total society. Steward's framework was modified and expanded by members of his team, both in the field and in the writing of the jointly authored book. While slow to have a wider impact, the project—both in its successes and its limitations—signaled new departures for the anthropological study of the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late 1940s Julian Steward initiated a social anthropological study of Puerto Rico, carried out by a team working in a range of communities representing different ecological zones. The project was a landmark in anthropology but met with criticism from Puerto Rican scholars. The articles in this collection reconsider the Puerto Rico Project in terms of its place within the history of anthropology, its reception in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, and some theoretical and political issues raised by it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his classic 1909 article, 'Classificatory systems of relationship', A. L. Kroeber argued for a universal procreative or genealogical grid that is largely independent of external causation and therefore directly revelatory of the structure of the human mind. Kroeber's argument is brought to bear upon the so-called 'new kinship studies', particularly upon the lack of such a grid posited in these studies, and is shown to be ethnographically more sensitive. It is, moreover, philosophically more liberating, precisely because it posits the mind's independent activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndt's writing at times obscured the core insights that he had about Yolngu society, and partly as a consequence Australian anthropology has not yet made the best use of the immense richness of his ethnographic legacy. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndt's writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between professional anthropology and new technologies of administration that emerged after the First World War in French West Africa. Local administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional ethnologists. Together they created a shared field of colonial ethnology, a scientific-administrative complex through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether deliberately or despite actors' self-understanding. The goal is neither to dismiss anthropology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse individual anthropologists of supporting colonial violence. Instead, this article analyzes how ethnologists' (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. These administrative and scientific imperatives constituted colonial humanism, a doubled and contradictory political rationality, even as they were its products. The French administration thus produced terms and data taken up by French ethnology that then shaped policies, which fueled administrative ethnographies that generated metropolitan scholarship and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]