by Robert Launay I have taught the history of anthropology since 1978, give or take a year (who’s counting?). At the beginning and the end of my career, I have had to cope with the same question: why should students have to study the history of the discipline? The rationale underlying such a question has shifted radically, though. The 1980s were the heyday of positivism, the conviction that social “sciences” like anthropology should actually be scientific, that is to say {+}
Is there anything new to say in the never-ending discussion of anthropology and espionage? Most anthropologists think it is unethical to gather intelligence on behalf of the government when they do their fieldwork — but not all of them. Some spies pose as anthropologists. Sometimes people start out as anthropologists and move into espionage as a form of applied work. Indigenous people and others have criticized anthropology as itself inherently a form of unethical surveillance which aids colonialism. It turns {+}
It’s Anthropology Day, our discipline’s latest invented tradition! A time for reflection on chocolate mint and the values of our discipline, Anthropology Day 2018 is uniquely placed this year. Earlier this week, Cultural Anthropology ran a powerful and important reflection by David Platzer and Anne Allison on the tenuous situation anthropology is in as tenure track jobs continue to disappear. And, even more importantly, yesterday was the 164 birthday of George Hunt, the First Nations anthropologist who helped found modern American anthropology {+}
Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday at the age of 88. On the Internet and social media, people remembered her as a feminist and poet, defender of culture and integrity against capitalism and commercialism, and exemplar of the depth and sophistication of genres variously described as science fiction, fantasy, and YA. Anthropologists have a special relationship to Le Guin because she was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, the founder of Berkeley anthropology and the first person to take a {+}
The first time I read Coming of Age in Samoa was in my Intro to Anthro course. My teacher — and future mentor — was a social anthropologist and a social conservative of the Mary Douglas stripe. As we read the book she carefully pointed out passages where Mead seemed to contradict herself. Her impatience with the books was obvious, and at the end of the class she said “There, now you can say you’ve read something by Margaret Mead”. {+}
Ya’ll know what I’m talking about, right? These pictures get used all the time on the Internet and in class. Memeworthy in extremis, they manage to pay homage to a founder of our discipline while simultaneously to taking him too seriously — an ironic, typically anthropological move. But where do they actually come from? In honor of the new twitter account for my history of anthropology tumblr, Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists, I tracked down the original picture. As some {+}
Anthropology has an unhealthy relationship to its past. Approaches range from highly fetishized, almost ritual reading of sacralized texts like The Gift and The Nuer to intense, context-free denunciations of past practitioners based on their race, gender, and emplacement in nineteenth century. In fact, perhaps the most common relationship anthropologists have to their history is ignorance. Anthropologists often have little sense of what the discipline has achieved (or not achieved) in the past, and famously reinvent the fundamental insights of {+}
This semester I taught ANTH 490, the History of Anthropology. It is a required class for our majors and is sort of a ‘capstone’ for their anthropology experience, despite the fact that we have a three field department and I only cover sociocultural anthropology. This was my first time teaching the course, and I wanted to give the students a sense of the anthropological canon reformed — something that had both classic readings but also presented previously excluded or marginal {+}
So I started a Tumblr. It contains highly accurate pictures of anthropologists. I thought maybe it would help people who wanted to see well-sourced, high-quality pictures of anthropologists. This Tumblr is driven by my long-term interest in curating open access material. The Internet is awash in high-quality material. But it’s also awash in… well, let’s just say that sometimes the signal to noise ration on the Internet is not where I’d want it to be. Nowhere is this more true {+}