Paper short abstract:

The archives are full of surprises, some of which raise awkward questions, like "What if foundational tropes, generated by historicists who wrote the history of anthropology before Malinowski, are based on a misreading of the archive?" That is the effect of a new "Irish" reading of Haddon's papers.

Paper long abstract:

It is difficult to decide which is more surprising: an insurgency by Victorian ethnographers that was inspired by anarchist and Solidarist ideas, or the roll-out of a formally-innovative, visual anthropology as a vehicle for anti-colonial activism in the 1890s. What is not surprising is that both are invisible to historians of anthropology, which raises some questions: what happens when an historiographical tradition is based on faulty premises? What if the foundational tropes, generated by the historicists who defined the history of anthropology before Malinowski, are based on a misreading of the archive? In response, I argue that the experimental ethnographic study of the Aran Islands that Haddon undertook in 1892 represents a synthesis of Kropotkin's anarchist geography, Geddes' interpretation of Le Play's social survey, and Havelock Ellis's Solidarist reworking of the theory of village communities. Furthermore, I will argue that Haddon's study has to be "read" in the context of decolonisation in Ireland in the 1890s. I will present, as evidence, an "Irish" reading of the Haddon papers and related material, which includes material discovered in 2013 and 2015. This relates to a programme of anti-colonial slideshows that have remained invisible to historians of disciplinary anthropology. I propose that these slideshows constituted a modern form of visual anthropology that Haddon deployed in an insurgency in the 1890s, which pivoted on a confrontation between "cultural" and "physical" factions in Ipswich in 1895. At stake was the capacity of anthropologists to prevent to genocide, a challenge that remains utterly relevant today.