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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]

This article explores the life of Viktor von Weizsäcker (VvW, 1886–1957), a German medical doctor, philosopher and founder of the Heidelberg School of Anthropological Medicine, from a psychobiographical and salutogenic perspective. The authors use salutogenesis and sense of coherence (SOC), and take crucial cultural, historical, and socio-structural frameworks into account to explore the life during the 19th and 20th Centuries in Germany. They present the exploration of a strong SOC in the life of VvW and show how SOC is created within the tight family bonds of the family clan, which has produced many extraordinary theologists, philosophers, scientists and politicians over six generations. In a complex, interconnected and holistic way, SOC is evident in von VvW's individual life, and is also shown to be a family resource. This article contributes to psychobiography in three ways: it develops the salutogenetic perspective in psychobiography, explores the life of VvW within a specific sociocultural context, and investigates the life from a salutogenetic and socio-cultural perspective. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and recommendations for theory and practice are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that 'myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.' Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno's insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage of Horkheimer and Adorno's account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno's task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the 'theological dimensions of capitalism.' Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores, through a close reading of newspapers and publications connected to the Portuguese libertarian movement, anarchist discourses and practices around understandings of "race" in Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A contribution is made both to studies of Lusophone anarchism as well as broader labour movement history where analyses of the interconnections between race and colonialism have been sparse. Portuguese anarchist understandings of race are placed within the context of broader ideas on internationalism within the anarchist movement, contemporary theories of the inheritance of racial characteristics and contestations against notions of nationhood and nationalism. The specific context of Portuguese colonialism and the development of anthropology in the country form the backdrop against which anarchist ideas are analysed. The article argues that while anarchism disrupted certain tropes within racial and colonialist discourse, it also reinforced some cultural categories and rigidified understandings of race, culture and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews Patrick L. Schmidt's book chronicling the rise and fall of Harvard's Department of Social Relations (Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science) and contrasts Schmidt's history with work of other scholars focusing on the impacts of the Cold War on Harvard's social sciences during this period. While Schmidt provides important new historical details about the Department of Social Relations, with significant new information on some of Harvard's internal politics, this review considers some of the department's failures in relation to the chilling effects of McCarthyism and some department members covert arrangements with intelligence agencies, and limits to free inquiry during the early Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro's anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging, sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of 'gossip'. However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as investigator and subject understood in different ways the meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they co-produced. Ultimately, Shapiro's ambivalent approach to the status of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with Pitcairn's local hospitable forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the concurrent development of Edward Spicer's theory of 'enduring peoples' and his political support for the federal recognition of the Pascua Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona. This case illustrates how dynamic conceptions of acculturation and indigeneity dissipate in the face of recognition and more politically expedient narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang's representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang's works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang's visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of "Mongoloid" or "Yellow" racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of "Mongoloid/Yellow." His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds theoretical and empirical light on the ritual media events constructed around the deaths of three Cold War political leaders in the 1980s: the Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986), the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme (1927–1986), and the Soviet Union general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982). Investigating news articles published in the first days after the news of each death broke, as well as news articles on the funeral for each and the immediate aftermath, this study utilises historical news television and print media material, obtained from the national and media archives in Finland, Sweden and Russia. By bringing the study of media culture and history into a dialogue shared with anthropology and political history, this article produces new knowledge on the workings and outcomes of ritual media events in the context of Cold War history. The article places special emphasis on Victor Turner's ritual analysis and the ways in which power was symbolically transformed in these societies with different political and ideological histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses visual anthropology to bring forth the migration histories of Nepali women, especially those related to Gurkha soldiers. Using personal and archival photographs and videos of migrants and their families, this article uncovers mobility patterns and migration histories of some Nepali women. The article uses visuals to build a narrative that deals not just with migration histories and destinations that go beyond South Asia, but the larger meanings that individuals attach to the visuals. This article goes beyond the "factual data" that the visuals "reveal" by talking to the individuals in the photos or those possessing the photos about the contexts and experiences attached to those photos. The photos, taken mostly during the 20th century, help individuals not just to be reminiscent about the past, but also to reflect critically on their migration pathways and experiences retrospectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the ethnographic encounter between two Aboriginal men and various Australian anthropologists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. These men, Mickey Dow Dow and Jim Kite, played a critical role in the development of a body of knowledge associated with Australian Aboriginal people. The important role that these men played in shaping an understanding of Aboriginal relationships to place, personhood and myth is significant. By critically interrogating the field notebooks and diaries of the seminal Australian ethnographers that worked with these men I bring to the fore the nature of these engagements and discuss the various ways in which ideas were communicated. Critically, it was illustrations, maps and acts of translation and performance that often worked to bridge the gap between understandings. [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 explores the ways in which the dead trouble the otherwise strong commitment in the human sciences to the centrality of cultural and historical specificities. Focusing on the work of the anthropologist, Katherine Verdery, and the historian, Thomas Laqueur, the article considers how they deploy the concept of 'enchantment' to make sense of, or, at least, room for, what they see as the special qualities of the dead body, when it comes to its cultural emplacement. The article concludes by situating this work on the troublesome dead in relation to other trends within academia softening the line on enchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil was a new political nation ( I nação i ) that had to contend with a variety of African and Indigenous "nations" ( I nações i ) within its borders - whether Congo, Nagô, Benguela, or Botocudo, Tupi, Guaykuru - who were considered to exist outside of "good society" consisting of propertied white citizens. From the eve of independence in 1822 until the years following the end of monarchical rule in 1889, Brazil's Atlantic frontier, where the provinces of Bahia, Espírito Santo, and Minas Gerais met, became a theater of staggering anti-Indigenous violence and the entrenchment of African-based slavery. Black and Indigenous Histories of Brazil's Race Mixture: An excerpt from Yuko Miki's Frontiers of Citizenship challenges dominant racial narratives about Latin America, illuminating the exclusionary making of the "Brazilian people". [Extracted from the article]

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]

As a major area of dialogue between socio-economic history research and anthropology, land settlement, lineage development, worship of gods, the evolution of household registration system, and ethnic group issues all showed the dynamic process of the regional socio-cultural structure. The study of history was not only an account of people's agency in the social construction of territories, but also an examination of how historical narratives themselves were structured in the social construction of territories, and how this structure drove and constrained people's actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with specific field within the history of science: the institutional as well as biographical history of anthropological and archaeological museums. Through several case studies, more general questions are explored, those that inquire into the role of museums in delineating the agenda of anthropology and archaeology; the role of leading personalities of this discipline in envisioning and operating the museum institutions; the relationships between museums and governing institutions in national and (post)colonial contexts, and the interaction of museum with the general public, and specifically with the indigenous groups – that is, the very groups archaeology and anthropology are aiming to study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia: By Paul Turnbull. The book's structure is chronological but has a focus on what Turnbull calls "the long nineteenth century" (14) when the collection of Indigenous remains was guided by often changing theoretical and intellectual interests. According to Turnbull, these activities resulted in the remains of approximately 6,000 Indigenous Australians being collected and sent to scientific institutions, first overseas and then to domestic museums. [Extracted from the article]

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]

This article traces the life and work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre (1888–1971), a Belgian explorer and ethnographer. While fragments of his oeuvre are familiar to scholars of South America, he is almost completely unknown in historical studies, and largely forgotten within anthropology too. Here we will explore his filmic work as well as its contribution to the history of visual anthropology. While de Wavrin's work cannot be divorced from the discipline's colonial and Eurocentric heritage, we show that his visual record provides notable historic insights and merits further scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

François Levaillant (also Le Vaillant, born Vaillant) was the most influential early traveler to South Africa. His narrative illustrations of his travels, however, have not been widely studied, in part because many were not published in his travel books. Levaillant's role as a founding figure of African anthropology has received increased attention, but illustrations of his first visit to the Gonaqua deserve greater scrutiny, in part because they differ so markedly from his written account. This article argues, following Matthys Bokhorst, that Levaillant conceptualized and produced most of the illustrations himself and concludes that he gave the illustrations an allegorical force as a way of re-viewing, re-considering and theorizing the significance of his visit and his role as observer and anthropologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World history curriculum continues to be plagued by Eurocentric narratives and perspectives eliminating local and community agency in Caribbean history. Textbooks and curriculum standards exclude much of Caribbean history and marginalize the influence and contributions of the African Diaspora. Oftentimes, Caribbean achievements are attributed to European influence and not the local community as seen with the Haitian Revolution and diffusion of the European Enlightenment. African culture and syncretic Haitian religion however, heavily contributed to the inspiration of revolution by African slaves in Haiti. This article explores ways educators can infuse the African Diaspora into Caribbean history through anthropology. Using an ethnographic lens to examine the Haitian Revolution, Haitian Voudou, and Toussaint L'Ouverture presents a new way educators can teach about this pivotal event and society in World History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines German filmmaker Philip Scheffner's 2007 film The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story about the Halfmoon Camp, a German WWI colonial prisoner-of-war camp. Extensive anthropological research was carried out upon its prisoners, and the camp was also the subject of popular colonial representations. Scholars and others made sound recordings, photographs, films, and drawings and recorded details of prisoners, this documentation now located in German archives. The film considers intertwined histories of German anthropology and colonialism at the camp by means of such documents and is also drawn to traces and mediated presences of individuals held there, evoked especially through sound recordings. Moreover, it looks searchingly at contemporary landscapes for traces and repression of this colonial history. Overall, the film is characterised by a sense of incompleteness of the archive, a layering of visual and aural techniques of display and absence, and metaphors of haunting, producing a 'ghost story'. [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 argues that heterogeneity among leftist political activists in Ukraine creates new spaces for investigation of social movements in post-socialist spaces. It suggests that the researcher's positionality impacts how this diversity is seen, interpreted, and analyzed. Drawing from scholarship on engaged anthropology and ethnographic research during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations, I show how fragmentation among leftists had a dual influence, sometimes encouraging leftists to move beyond difference to avoid alienation, and other times creating greater fractures that limited the creation of alternative social projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of terms, and keywords that have appeared over the last 50 years in the Anthropological Index (now AIO) challenges anthropology's purported universal coverage of regions and topics. Anthropological article production published in specialized periodicals leaves many areas uncovered, some topics marginalized, or absent. The article takes the presence or absence of keywords in articles in anthropological literature from all world regions to ask what may have generated these gaps. We argue that keyword use can reveal the role that geographical positioning, languages spoken, and national histories may have had in anthropological production. Shamanism and cognate concepts such as animism and spirit possession are taken to guide an analysis of the anthropological production in different languages through the use of keywords that appear in the coverage of AIO. The research demonstrates how far keywords use is shaped by contingent adjustments to predicaments and theoretical concerns with complex historical roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Shino Konishi b is a historian based in the School of Humanities and the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. A Golden Key International Scholar Society member, Tess then completed a PhD at the University of Canberra focusing on Indigenous women's leadership in Australia. She has curated art exhibitions across Australia and North American including "Old Masters: Australia's Great Bark Artists at the National Museum of Australia", in Canberra. [Extracted from the article]

The early history of anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany wove together contributions from medicine, metaphysics, and a host of other disciplines in an attempt to develop a holistic ‘science of man.’ This paper examines a literary text written by prominent figure in that movement, Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Dreams (Träume) (1754). The collection of parables staged as dreams in this book presents specifically literary cases against the sufficiency of either philosophy or physiology for the study of human life as a whole. Through close readings of a number of these dreams and related texts, this paper shows how Krüger’s Dreams advocates an approach to anthropology that recognizes the importance of literature for an interdisciplinary study of human life. More than simply recognising literary writing as another means of studying human life, the vision of a new anthropology implied in this book draws on literary devices to counter the overconfidence and partisanship of existing philosophical and medical theories of human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cora Du Bois (1903-1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government--including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908-1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite these stark differences, when taken together, Schmerler's and Du Bois's careers and reputations shed light on sexism and homophobia in and around the discipline, changing approaches to fieldwork and cultural analysis, and the political and public contexts of American anthropology in the mid-20th century. [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 author reflects on the history of anthropology. Topics discussed include the 100th death anniversary of anthropologists Sir Edward B. Tylor and Émile Durkheim, the contributions of anthropology's founding fathers Bronislaw Malinowski to the field, and the author's suggested books related to anthropology.

Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956) was a key figure in the establishment of African studies in Germany and Britain. He was a pioneer German linguist and member of the founding generation of German Africanists (Afrikanistik) who played a significant role in the field. As professor at Berlin University, the co-director of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) in London from 1926 and an adviser to Lord Hailey’s research team for the monumental ‘An African Survey’ (1938), he was central to the promotion of policy research in the African colonial context during the inter-war era. His own work focused on the phonetics and orthography of the Sudanic languages and the methodologies he pioneered were widely adopted in West Africa. As editor of the journalsKoloniale Rundschau(Berlin) andAfrica(London), with links to Rockefeller research funding, he was able, with Malinowski and J. H. Oldham, to wield considerable influence over the shape of anthropological and linguistic research for more than 20 years. His links to the Colonial Office and the International Missionary Council (IMC) in London and the Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Colonial Department of the Third Reich, meant that he was uniquely placed as an adviser to both governments. This would seem to raise important questions about the similarities and differences in the climates of scientific work in these diverse contexts which has to date not attracted much attention. Westermann’s career provides a portrait of the complex academic inter-war era that Africanists scholars needed to navigate in a world charged with political conflict and the seeds of development debates that were to come to fruition with UNESCO initiatives in the post-war years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anthropology is plural, not singular, and only a section of its history is decided within universities. A critical re-examination of the work of Lord Raglan demonstrates that retaining an overly academic conception of anthropology impoverishes our understanding of its pasts and its futures. The last of the gentleman-scholars in British anthropology, Raglan was a prominent polemicist of the mid-century, who persistently kept anthropological approaches to contemporary concerns within the public eye. Though a postwar President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and praised by scholars in neighbouring disciplines, Raglan’s diffusionism was sharply criticized by standard-bearers of structural-functionalism. Adopting a broader perspective, Raglan can be viewed as both a sharp-eyed scholar and a successful public intellectual; re-assessment of his work and its effects leads to a re-consideration of the historiography of mid-century UK anthropology: particular theories, though denigrated by mainstream anthropologists, may continue to flourish in other disciplines or extra-academic arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three different appropriations of a 1928 photograph from South India allow insights into German anthropology in the 1920s, contemporary German museum practices, and present-day ritual forms in northern Kerala. Juxtaposing these readings as what Edwards named evidential strategies, power of representation, and re-experiencing demonstrates the possibilities and limits of visual representation. The article contributes to a Picturing Culture debate that considers entrenched visual economies of archived photographs, and opts for an understanding of different aspects of cultural knowledge transported through photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an ethnographic study of collaboration for publishing textual representations of the Sámi based on ethnographic experience that reflect acquisition of agency and contingent intertextuality. The textual ethnography unravels early twentieth-century collaborative frameworks in which the investigated works were generated and their historical context. Consequently, my paper proposes to re-evaluate the role and impact of the ethnographic writing by Emilie Demant Hatt in addition to her collaboration with Johan Turi. This entails an exploration into personal histories and relationships, gendered ramifications, intellectual and political context, the creative process, the contingent editorial activities and their reception histories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a method of collections building within the practice of natural history, the exchange of duplicate specimens was carried out by anthropology curators and collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper examines exchanges resulting from a three-month tour of European museums by Smithsonian Institution Curator of Ethnology Otis T. Mason in 1889. Framed by the idea of a network of social and institutional ties, we evaluate the role of specimen exchange in the development of anthropology and museums on an international scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay I review two quite different works concerning the rise of American anthropology as a discipline. Both address the display of anthropology and the ways it presented itself to the public and represented itself to the field during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and provide alternative views of the coalescence of the field. I argue that each provides valuable insights into those formation processes without fully coming to grips with the contradictions inherent to the discipline during its formation, and which remain as fault lines in anthropological inquiry today. [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.

In this article I address the political use of discourses, symbols and logics of time in historiography and anthropology. For a major part of the article, I focus on the anthropologist Johannes Fabian whose writings offer a strong criticism of the politics of time and also have great relevance for historians and philosophers of history. Fabian criticizes anthropology for treating the Other as if living in another time, and he proposes to counter these 'politics of time' by stressing the contemporaneity of humanity and the coevalness of anthropologists and their research objects. I follow Fabian's analysis of the political (ab)use of spatiotemporal 'distancing' but argue that this (ab)use cannot successfully be addressed by stressing the notions of coevalness and contemporaneity. Rather, I radically embrace the idea of non-coevalness and non-contemporaneity. I argue that allochronism results not necessarily from a 'denial of coevalness' but, rather, from a specific notion of historical contemporaneity. Drawing on arguments by Jacques Derrida I claim that parts of Fabian's thinking are dependent on a problematic 'metaphysics of presence.' Drawing on the work of Louis Althusser and Peter Osborne I argue for a more emancipatory analysis of the politics of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article examines the lives of artefacts collected by physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička during his expeditions to Peru. In 1910 and 1913, Hrdlička travelled to the Andean nation to gather materials that could shed light on the peopling of the Americas, health and disease in pre-Columbian societies, and the purported racial ‘types' of the region. The study focuses on cultural artefacts the scientist acquired, beginning with these materials’ collection as specimens meant to reveal the racial prehistory of the Andes, and continuing with their classification, display, and exchange as museum objects at the Smithsonian Institution. My analysis of Hrdlička's Peruvian collection draws attention not only to how scientific representations of Peru and the Andes have shifted over time, but also to the way in which a focus on museum objects can elucidate changing notions about the cultural agency of prehistoric populations and their present-day descendants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is by now a truism that anthropology, especially British social anthropology, emerged under the regime of colonialism, and thus, to some extent, bears the imprint of and some responsibility for that oppressive institution. The reality is much more interesting. This paper, by focusing on the role of funding in the success of many intellectual paradigms, traces the source of the pre-eminence of British structural-functionalism not to the colonial system, but rather to an American intellectual tradition that was progressive, reform-minded, and devoted to benefiting oppressed peoples, especially African-Americans and latterly Africans. [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]

My afterword engages six papers in the special issue “Archives and Anthropologies: From Histories to Futures”. It teases out particular arguments, locates common themes and explores the papers' relevance to wider debates in anthropology and visual culture. My paper particularly focuses on discussions around anthropology's analytical priorities and the position of the visual/material Vis-à-vis the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]