Thursday Chats

With the exception of the following, the Thursday Chat entries have been moved to a separate Thursday Chats page.

---

Adventures in Scholarly Publishing: Balancing Risk with Reward and a Great Deal of Determination

March 10, 2022

Vivian Berghahn with Marion Berghahn

Vivian Berghahn, and Marion Berghahn, publishers at Berghahn Books discuss the pros and cons of open access publishing now and in the immediate future. Vivian Berghahn is Managing Director and Journals Editorial Director. In addition to overseeing the journals division at Berghahn, her managerial responsibilities include advancing the company’s online initiatives and the strategic development of its overall publishing program. Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Marion Berghahn studied at the universities of Hamburg, Paris, and Freiburg where she received a DPhil in American Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy. In 1969, she moved to England where she received an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, followed by a PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick. These subjects, together with history, formed the basis of her scholarly publishing program. In 1980, she started her first company, Berg Publishers, but was forced out in 1993 and subsequently started her new company, Berghahn Books, in 1994, and has been leading it ever since.

=======================================================

Papers from a session at the 2021 AAA meeting

Alfred L. Kroeber: The Man, His Work and His Legacy

Link to full versions of the papers in the Berose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: https://www.berose.fr/rubrique1087.html?lang=en

Kroeber, Alfred Louis (1876–1960)

Coordinated by Herbert S. Lewis

Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1960) was considered the “Dean of American Anthropology” from the 1940s until his death. A New Yorker from a German immigrant family, Kroeber began his higher education at Columbia University. He studied English literature and received an M.A. degree in that field but he left literature for anthropology and became Franz Boas’ first PhD at Columbia University in 1901. In the same year Kroeber left New York for a life in California. He was founder and the predominant intellectual force in the University of California-Berkeley Department of Anthropology from 1901 until his retirement in 1946, and beyond. He published more than 550 works—books, monographs, papers, reviews—on a wide range of topics in ethnology, linguistics, history, and archaeology. His subject was the whole world of humans and their cultures, their pasts and their interconnections. His works ranged from the micro to the macro level. On the one hand, he collected texts in Indian languages, recorded songs, and engaged in participant observation. On the other, he published works at the highest plane of theory, generalization, and worldwide cultural comparison. Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California is the foundation for the study of the indigenous peoples of that state. The legacy of his linguistics, ethnography, and recordings are invaluable to many California Indian groups and individuals. Kroeber ‘s testimony and his research were central to the success of California and other Indian groups in their Land Claims cases against the United States government. His book, Anthropology (1948), is a remarkable compendium of facts and ideas about the world’s peoples and cultures, and his massive edited enterprise, Anthropology Today (1953), encompassed the vast range of the field at that time. Kroeber became known outside of anthropology as a result of Theodora Kroeber’s book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), published soon after her husband’s death. Despite their serious intellectual disagreements, Kroeber was the heir to Boas’ reputation as the master of the field.

Click on the title to access the full article

“Alfred L. Kroeber’s Career and Contributions to California’s Indigenous Peoples” Herbert S. Lewis

The need for a session devoted to Alfred Louis Kroeber at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association became obvious when, on January 27, 2021, the name of that distinguished anthropologist was publicly removed from Kroeber Hall on the campus of the University of (…)

“The Anthropologist as Cultural Historian: Alfred Kroeber and the Forging of a Discipline” Stanley Brandes

Alfred Kroeber’s career should be understood largely as a crusade to define and establish—intellectually and institutionally—what was in his day a still largely new discipline: anthropology. He did this in two ways, first through practical demonstration, specifically the practice and promotion of (…)

“Alfred Kroeber and the Development of Linguistic Anthropology: A Brief Reassessment” James Stanlaw

Introduction: The Call for a Retrospective Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) is largely known today as one of the first founders of modern American anthropology, and as a major contributor to culture theory via such constructs as the “superorganic” (1917a), “culture area” (Driver 1962), or (…)

“The Kroeber‑Ishi Story: Three Cinematic Versions” Jack Glazier

In 1960 the University of California conferred the high honor of naming a building after the dean of American anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber, who attended the dedication of Kroeber Hall just months before his death. Sixty years after that dedication, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, attentive to (…)

“Alfred Kroeber’s Handbook and Land Claims: Anthros, Agents, and Federal (Un)Acknowledgment in Native California” Nicholas Barron

Introduction In January of 2021, the University of California, Berkeley announced that it would un-name Kroeber Hall, the facility that houses the school’s Department of Anthropology, a critical source of social scientific scholarship since its founding in 1901. According to the university’s (…)

“Goodbye Kroeber, Kroeber Hall, and the Man We Know as Ishi” Nancy Scheper‑Hughes

On January 26, 2021, UC Berkeley chancellor, Carol Christ, the president of the UC system and the chair of anthropology with the support of most of the anthropology faculty, [31] agreed that the time had come to erase the name of Alfred Kroeber from Kroeber Hall. Obviously, times change and my (…)

========================================================

2020 A.A.A. MEETING

Activist Realignments in the History of Anthropology: The Association of Senior Anthropologists’Panels at “Raising our Voices”

Grant Arndt

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Web Admin

When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, an online event titled “Raising our Voices” was offered as a substitute.

I had organized a history of anthropology-themed panel for the cancelled meeting, but along with my fellow panelists, elected to put it on hold as we all prepared for the transition of service and teaching to online platforms. I was therefore delighted when the Association of Senior Anthropologists announced that they had organized two panels for “Raising our Voices.” It was clear from the panel abstracts that the ASA sought to bring an historical dimension to the activist theme implied by the title of the new event, emphasizing the continuity of activism throughout the history of the discipline.

One of the panels, “Representing the History of American Anthropology,” mounted a defense of the founding generations of American anthropologists, seeking to recover their overlooked or misunderstood activist contributions. The second, “Voices of Experience,” documented the social justice commitments of some of today’s senior anthropologists. I took both panels’ approach to activism as a response to historical accounts of “the enduring ways in which the ‘objects’ of ethnographic inquiry have long been engaging, salvaging, adopting, and enchanting anthropology on their own terms” (to quote Nick Barron’s report from the AAA last year, “Who’s Zooming Who?”). As such, I’ve come to understand them as part of a positive movement toward a better understanding of anthropology’s ongoing history of activist engagements, one that transcends the entrenched polemics of critique and defense in which anthropology’s historical self-consciousness sometimes seems trapped.

“Representing the History of American Anthropology” included papers by four scholars known for their work on the topic. Herb Lewis, a key figure in the defense of anthropology in general and Franz Boas in particular for over two decades, focused on debunking the idea that past anthropologists trapped their interlocutors in the “savage slot” and that they contributed to Indigenous erasure by practicing “salvage anthropology.” Lewis argued that both charges misrepresent the motivations and the impact of anthropological work. Alice Beck Kehoe sketched out the historical entanglement of Americanist research and American Federal Indian policy and drew attention to the activist work of James Mooney and Frank Speck. She also argued for the value of salvage anthropology to contemporary Native communities. Jack Glazier drew from his revelatory recent book on Paul Radin’s work at Fisk University in 1920s, where Radin collected autobiographical narratives from elderly survivors of slavery. [1] Here Glazier emphasized how the project turned Radin’s distinctive interest in autobiographical narratives toward efforts to overturn white-supremacist narratives still foundational to American historical scholarship at the time. Perhaps the most provocative paper on the panel was given by Regna Darnell who issued a call for “an anthropologically-based historicism celebrating the multiple potentialities” of the current moment, one open to a variety of historical and contemporary purposes. Presented as a critique of the “closed” vision of the history of anthropology that she sees as having been championed by George Stocking, Darnell’s paper provided a framework for imagining the papers of her fellow panelists less as defenses of anthropological ancestors than as invitations to contemporary anthropologists to think about their own activist commitments as part of a long (if intermittent and sometimes marginal) anthropological tradition.

The other panel, “Voices of Experience,” developed this sense of the historical continuity of activist projects in anthropology by shifting from the heroic age of Americanist anthropology to recent decades. Rather than being based on traditional historical research, it presented what organizer Jim Weil has called the “living-history of the discipline.” [2] Each of the four participants discussed the various expressions of social justice activism evident in their careers. They emphasized that their social justice work had shown the value of anthropological methodologies and principles, in particular the basic idea that “people have their ways of thinking, different mental models” and that “we need to hear them even if we disagree with them” (Schensul). More specifically, Carol Mukhopadhyay told of her work on the American Anthropological Association’s traveling exhibition “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” Kathleen Fine-Dare spoke of moving outside of her research specialty to become her university’s Tribal Liaison for NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). Ralph Bolton discussed his work on HIV awareness education in Europe and his ongoing work on health, education and economic developments in the Peruvian Altiplano. And Jean Schensul described her work outside of the academy using community-based intervention methods to address HIV prevention and other health-related projects.

For me, the most striking aspect of the panel came when the panelists were asked how they would respond to “younger anthropologists” who argue that activism was easier in the past than it is now. They explained that the point of presenting their own experiences was not to challenge younger activists, because “every generation has its activists, and people build on past experience and past knowledge [but have to] own it now” (Mukhopadhyay). They noted that older activists may have learned lessons still applicable now, and made mistakes that could be made again. As one of the organizers summarized their message at the end, “we may be wasting time if we try to reinvent the wheel, but we may need to realign the wheels” (Weil). Ralph Bolton then extemporized a properly activist end to the session filled with a wealth of experience-based observations: “while things change, there is one thing that really remains the same and that is [that] all of us…simply have to take action for some social justice issue and find a way in which [we] can make a difference…”

It was in reflecting on the panels that I began to imagine a productive dialogue between them and the panel organized by Nick Barron and Hilary Leathem at last year’s AAA, which I took then as a provocative yet constructive account of the limits of anthropology from the perspective of Indigenous activism and activists. Alas, while the provocations of the panel last year could be followed up with post-panel discussions, the online platform for “Raising our Voices” abruptly ejected us from the virtual room at the scheduled end of each panel. We will thus need to find other online forums, and hopefully, one day soon, in-person venues to continue substantive debates over how best to deal with the entanglements created by activism as historians and as anthropologists.

[1] Jack Glazier, Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race, (Michigan State University Press, 2020).

[2] Jim Weil, “Discretionary Ethnography: Eliding the Personal and the Political in Two Latin American Research Settings,” Journal of Anthropological Research (Spring 2020), 8.

Grant Arndt – gparndt@iastate.edu – Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Iowa State University

========================================================

A bit of section lore:

The Official Gavel, Tony Paredes

Posted on January 29, 2012 by AAA Web Admin

____________________________________________________

Some historical Anthropology News columns and other links:

[None for now]