Representing anthropological collections in the Gilded Age

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.     

Modernization,colonialism, and the new anthropology of sport

Abstract

Anthropologists Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, and Thomas Carter have recently contributed a theoretically- and empirically-updated account of sport anthropology, the burgeoning, heterogenous, productive field dedicated to the myriad forms of sport and physical activity in human societies. This essay dialogically relates their contribution with previous conceptions of sport anthropology to better understand the interconnections between global and local contexts of physical culture and the relations between anthropological inquiry and important issues like social power, biopolitics, and colonialism. The essay specifically highlights the authors’ contextualization of assumptions of modernization and categorizations of “primitive” and “pre-modern” sport, arguing that a postcolonial approach to sport anthropology results in a more inclusive, nuanced framework for studying the anthropological dimensions of physical culture.     

Anthropology,Festival, and Spectacle

This article weaves together analyses of three recent books which, despite their being compiled primarily by scholars outside of the discipline of anthropology, make theoretical and methodological contributions useful to the anthropology of festivals and ritual, both religious and secular. These works demonstrate that spectacle has been ritualized into festive practices of modernity and identity in multiple places, times, and cultural contexts. Greater attention to how this works from a general anthropological perspective is needed.     

The “State Idea” in Theory and Practice

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity.     

Prostitution,Sex Work and Violence: Discursive and Political Contexts for Five Texts on Paid Sex, 1987–2001

This article deals with the trope of the victimised, female body in feminist debates on the selling of sexual services. The notion of ‘violence’ is central to the construction of a key axis of the debates. The article explores these issues by discussing five recent and historical feminist works on prostitution/sex work, and touches on works which address methodological issues of gathering information on an activity which is, by definition, illicit, stigmatised and socio‐politically marginalised. The essay brings out several tensions in the framing of the present debates, especially regarding the varied contexts of ‘the West’ and the ‘non‐West’, as well as issues of macropolitical change, including economic globalisation. It concludes with the ways in which the texts serve to disaggregate the concepts of ‘sex work’ and ‘violence’.     

The Anthropology of Christianity: Context,Contestation, Rupture,and Continuity

Still in its developmental stages, the anthropological study of Christianity is unsettled. This essay assesses the study of a faith tradition that has been relatively ignored until recently. The books under review offer examples of the emerging anthropology of Christianity. Four themes receive attention: challenges to the anthropology of Christianity, the comparative enterprise, authority and order, and the nexus of continuity and rupture. These themes provide a glimpse into anthropology's ongoing evolution in its own right and within the larger academy.     

The Erasure of the Middle Ages from Anthropology's Intellectual Genealogy

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.     

Forging Manhood and Nationhood Together: American Sailors’ Accounts of their Exploits,Sufferings, and Resistance in the Antebellum United States

This essay will focus on sailor narratives, published between 1815 and 1860, to explore how the authors remembered their seafaring experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in discussing how notions of national identity, patriotism, and manliness shaped these memoirists’ interpretation of their experiences during the War of 1812. I pay particular attention to how sailor authors dealt with the following topics: their impressment and incarceration as prisoners of war, their participation in naval battles, and their experiences with punishment, especially flogging, on the high seas. The essay views antebellum sailor narratives as part of a democratization of literature that popularized the stories of ordinary men and women in antebellum America (slaves, soldiers, artisans, and other working‐class people). It also explores how works of seafaring adventure by such popular writers as James Fenimore Cooper provided a market for memoirs by career sailors. The essay utilizes various kinds of sources to document the stories sailors told in their antebellum narratives. These include: pension, impressment, and prisoner‐of‐war records, ships’ muster books, and other institutional sources. It also builds on the historiography of antebellum seafaring life, especially works by Paul Gilje, Marcus Rediker, Margaret Creighton, and other scholars. The essay also utilizes works by both literary and historical scholars as well as cognitive psychologists to examine the legitimacy of using autobiographies as historical documents.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

The Enlightenment and the church in the work of Franco Venturi: the fertile legacy of a civil religion

The first part of this essay examines the reasons why the relationship between Enlightenment and religion was central to Franco Venturi's studies on the eighteenth century. In part this came from his own strong secular convictions and from the tradition of secular utopian thought in which Venturi came to intellectual maturity in Turin in the first half of the century, but whose origins lay in the eighteenth century. The essay then explores how these interests guided Venturi's choice to themes and topics, and how his understanding of the relationship changed in the course of his life and writings. The second part of the essay considers Venturi's legacy specifically in relation to this central theme, and discusses the works of subsequent scholars (including the author) whose work has most directly taken up and developed Venturi's own concern to explore the origins of different forms of secular religion in the age of the Enlightenment.     

Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth-century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti-tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly.     

Staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy: Hits and misses in the work of Michael Jackson

This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests future avenues for continued dialogue between philosophy and anthropology.     

Lebensaltertheorien in der Anthropologie der Romantik

Theories of stages of life within the anthropology of romanticism. – The essay discusses the importance and prominence of theories about different stages of life in the anthropological and medical discourse of romanticism. This discourse has clearly a stabilising and restaurative function, favouring the age of moderate manhood. The political and social regulative implications of these theories demand a restaurative roll‐back. The essay is based on a concept of sociology of knowledge formation.     

‘High Politics’ and its Intellectual Contexts*

Recent interest in the historiography of ‘high politics’ has centred mainly on historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s, above all Maurice Cowling. Less attention has been paid to the modified agendas pursued by the next generation of scholars. This essay explores some pioneering attempts to make sense of the structural relationships between 19th‐century British ‘high politics’ and its ‘intellectual’ contexts, focusing on a cluster of seminal 1980s studies by the historians Michael Bentley, Richard Brent, Boyd Hilton, and Jonathan Parry. Together, these works demanded a fundamental rethinking of how Victorian politics operated.     

Social agency and the dynamics of prehistoric technology

Technology is not only the material means of making artifacts, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon embedded in social action, worldviews, and social reproduction. This paper explores the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of technology that is compatible with this definition. Because of its focus on social agency, practice theory provides an appropriate starting point for a social theory of technology. In addition, three other themes require explicit attention: scale, context, and the materiality of technology. Four case studies demonstrate how archaeologists are beginning to take technology beyond its material dimensions, and additional questions are proposed stemming from the theoretical issues raised in the paper. The purpose of this essay is to synthesize a diverse set of emerging ideas and approaches to understand better dynamic community-level social processes of prehistoric material culture production.     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

Economic Opportunity,Civil Society and Political Liberty

This essay explores the dilemmas associated with ‘squaring the circle’ of wealth creation, social cohesion and political freedom in the OECD countries. As the metaphor of square and circle implies, these three essential goals of development are not necessarily compatible and may even conflict with each other, particularly at a time when advancing globalization creates perverse choices. To become and remain competitive in international markets requires a flexible use of resources which threatens social cohesion and political freedom in a number of ways. After analysing these tensions, the essay concludes with six proposals for improving the likelihood that a workable balance between prosperity, democracy and social cohesion can be maintained in advanced industrial societies.     

Head-hunters and knowledge-gatherers: Colonialism,engineers and fields of planning

An archival reconstruction of a 1930s engineering expedition to study the hydro-electric potential of the River Nile explores the investigative modalities of engineers. Contributing to an evolving anthropology of infrastructure and electricity the paper offers a material/relational analysis of an engineering field of planning and explores the relationship between ways of seeing and the drive to quantify (commensuration). Contributing to the study of colonialism, the paper finds that the engineering methods brought the African population into view either as a labour force or as politically troublesome but not as potential consumers of electricity.     

The Sartre–Camus Quarrel and the Fall of the French Intellectual

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual.     

Intellectual Property and Cultural Appropriation

Many recent works on intellectual property have been published that come from outside anthropology but offer context for a set of ethical and legal questions central to the discipline, subsumed by the term cultural appropriation. These questions include concern for the circulation of ethnographic knowledge beyond source communities. Four recent works address the relationship between intellectual property and cultural appropriation. These books do not deal with iconic anthropological source communities. Rather, they offer anthropologists points of entry into debates on cultural appropriation that are of urgent interest both within and beyond anthropology.