Paper short abstract:

This paper is a self-reflexive account of my work in anthropology in/of Turkey, an ecclecctic non-Western tradition, combining national projects as well as transnational intellectual streams and political constellations, best scrutinized through the perspective of transnational histories.

Paper long abstract:

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro clearly stated in his HOAN-M keynote speech in 2023: “Although anthropology is a transnational discipline, most histories of anthropologies are nation-centric". Working on the transnational encounters for a long time, I explore new methodological horizons in the example of anthropology in/of Turkey, which has flourished with different transnational entanglements at different times. Writing transnational histories involves considering diverse forms and manifestations of encounters, facilitated by various actors and institutions. It enables us to delve into the historical embeddedness of, and examine the intricate links between geopolitical developments over time. It also offers a nuanced understanding of how anthropological encounters intersect with other traditions influencing and, in turn, being influenced by the cultural and social contexts within which they unfold. The role of production of anthropological knowledge and dissemination of such knowledge is crucial as it sheds light on the ways in which understandings and insights are construed, how they impact distinct epistemic communities and how the dynamics of knowledge production within diverse intellectual milieus emerge. Writing transnational histories offers us, historians of anthropologies, valuable gains: it helps us to connect with colleagues engaged in similar endeavours. It can provide a broader discourse on different anthropologies with an opportunity to navigate beyond the “center-periphery” and “grand-minor narratives" debates, and challenge established narratives with new and nuanced insights. Identifying the development of patterns applicable to diverse traditions, including the critical examination of moments of crisis, is a unique opportunity, as anthropology often flourishes in those times (Narotzky 2021).

Paper short abstract:

This paper experiments with a critical and comparative reappraisal of the 1990s as a moment in the history of anthropology. Doing so reveals ethical ambitions and political shortcomings that continue to shape debates in our field, not least about the promises and practices of solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

In the histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for example, or the 1980s. In this paper, I experiment with a critical and comparative reappraisal of a decade closer to our present: the 1990s. In the wake of the Cold War, with the end of the millennium looming, and with the implications of the World Wide Web rushing into view, the 1990s were the temporal ground for an anthropology—of globalisation, technology, and much else besides—that both responded to, and was facilitated by, an apparent liberal hegemony that proved to be short lived. Today, the 1990s are often treated with nostalgia, derision, or some combination of both. But with the benefit of some three decades’ distance, and with a view to the discipline’s current condition, I join others in beginning to historicise 1990s anthropology, tracking its turns amid the political conditions and cultural moods of that moment. I do so here by approaching this disciplinary history alongside the history of an adjacent (and occasionally overlapping) intellectual and social formation, that of engaged Buddhism. Considering how anthropologists and engaged Buddhists grappled, through the 1990s, with a set of related questions—about the global and the local, participation and observation, suffering and freedom—reveals ethical ambitions and political shortcomings that continue to inflect debates in both fields, not least about the promises and practices of solidarity.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the role of oral practices of discussion, text elaboration, and dictation in Malinowski’s writing process. By showing documents from the archives, it aims to recover Masson’s contribution to her husband’s work helping to un/doing histories of anthropologies.

Paper long abstract:

As many biographical sources and the MFEA research have highlighted, Elsie R. Masson (1890-1935) supported her husband, Bronislaw K. Malinowski (1884-1942), as an informal assistant, a reader, a discussant, and a copy-editor. Several parts of Malinowski’s manuscripts, both those which were eventually published and the unpublished ones, held in the archives, are written in Masson’s hand, as he used to dictate his papers and chapters to her. But how did this dictation process work? To what extent could have Malinowski and Masson rearranged orally some parts of the texts? Could Masson have participated actively and creatively to this writing process? Although Malinowski and Masson’s voices had got missed in the very process of dictation, by analyzing material from the archives it is possible to speculate on their collaboration in discussion and even dictation. As a part of an ongoing research, on the one hand, this presentation focuses on the role of oral practices of discussion, text elaboration, and dictation in Malinowski’s writing process. On the other, by showing documents from the archives, it aims to recover Masson’s contribution to her husband’s work, thereby continuing searching for her missing voice to un/doing histories of anthropologies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses two studies from Germany: Heinrich Berghaus, Grundlinien der Ethnographie [Basic Principles of Ethnography] (1849) and Theodor Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker (1859-72). Both produced ethnographic studies without leaving the country. What was ethnographic about their work?

Paper long abstract:

The “Malinowskian Revolution” (Jarvie 1964) has been amnesic in equating ethnography with fieldwork. Since then, ethnography is considered valid only when based on fieldwork. This assumption has led to a marginalization of earlier ethnographers, who were ignored and sidelined. Before Malinowski (1922), ethnography wasn’t a method but a research program for describing and comparing cultural and social aspects of ethnic groups and nationalities. As explained in Before Boas (2015), ethnography emancipated out of moral history, historia civilis, during the eighteenth century. When the subject was introduced in England in 1834, George Long translated ethnography with “nation-description.” During the nineteenth century, there was a growing interest in ethnography. Ethnographic studies based on (early forms of) fieldwork are most interesting, but some ethnographies were library studies, based on reports by travellers, compilations of work by others. This paper discusses two studies from Germany: Heinrich Berghaus (1797-1884), Grundlinien der Ethnographie [Basic Principles of Ethnography] (Stuttgart 1849, 404 pp.) and Theodor Waitz (1821-1864), Anthropologie der Naturvölker [The Anthropology of Natural Peoples] (Leipzig 1859-1872, 6 vols.). Both produced detailed ethnographic studies without leaving the country. The same goes for J.C. Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (3rd ed. 1836-47) and R.G. Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology (1859). What was ethnographic about their work? How can ethnography be ethnographic without fieldwork?

Paper short abstract:

The ethnographic part of this painting is offered in 32 images at the top (2 groups, one of 'savage nations' and another of 'civilized nations'), complemented with numerous texts. There ample space is dedicated to the ancient history of Peru, the Incas, as well as of contemporary Peru.

Paper long abstract:

There is in the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Madrid, a large painting (331 x 118,5 centimeters) which was made with the information offered by a Basque economist –José Ignacio Lequanda– with long experience in Peru, from which a long text of more than 60 pp. is collected, in pen on white, on geography, economics, Peruvian natural and civil history. In this painting, the text occupies the role of the internal frame – passepartout – of some 195 boxes, where 194 animals and 148 plants typical of the Peruvian landscape are collected distributed around an approximate area of ​​6 square meters. These drawings are due to Louis Thiebaut, a painter belonging to a famous French family who adorned several works of Illustrated science.

In this painting the ethnographic part is offered in 32 images (2 groups of 16 people, one of 'savage nations' and another of 'civilized nations') that appear prominently at the top, with an identifying subtitle in each case; but it is strategically complemented with numerous texts. There, ample space is dedicated to the ancient history of Peru –the Incas–, as well as to the different populations of contemporary Peru, differentiating between the territory of the savages (the eastern jungle or 'royal mountain'), and the urban areas of each province of the viceroyalty. Although the informative emphasis corresponds to the socioeconomic part, with proposals of its good political administration, we are offered a 'distant look' at its ethnic origins and the geographical and natural context of the territory.

Paper short abstract:

From 1807 to 1848 James Cowles Prichard drew on a variety of resources to agglomerate the broad discipline of anthropology that dominated British anthropological thought during much of the nineteenth century. This paper outlines his motives and provides a brief chronology of his contributions.

Paper long abstract:

James Cowles Prichard, a devout Evangelical Quaker growing up in the British port city of Bristol, understood that all humankind was of a single species and of single origin, not multiple ones as a pernicious theory then gaining ground asserted. Lacking in scientific proof and contradicting Holy Scripture, the notion of polygenism could justify the abhorrent institution of slavery. Vowing to demonstrate scientifically the single origin and unity of humankind, he trained as a scientist by studying medicine.

This paper outlines some of Prichard’s publications and speeches in which he brought to bear on his subject biology, history, linguistics, psychology and the study of cultures and ‘sepulchral remains’ - the stuff of modern anthropology. He published widely, cultivated an international network of scholars and was instrumental in developing organisational anthropology. His final publication of 1849 describes the modern discipline in its broadest sense, defines culture and stresses the importance of its study. His career-long struggle against a rising tide of race-ranking biological anthropology was all but lost for a time, however. Threads of humane Prichardian anthropology nevertheless run through the eventually regenerated discipline - one with new founders, new assumptions and new histories.

James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life in Science during the Age of Improvement will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in June, 2025.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for a reappraisal of E.B. Tylor's "Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern" (1861) as a contribution to ethnography and, more generally, for a historicist and inclusive historiography of anthropologies, exploring early forms of ethnographic writing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses recent historiographical debates on the first published book by the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) – “Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexican, Ancient and Modern”. Issued in 1861, this text offers the original results of Tylor’s observation of Mexican antiquities and modern populations, during his travels through Mexico in 1856. Although Tylor’s contemporaries did acknowledge Anahuac’s first-hand information on Mexican populations (Geological Magazine 1865), his biographers treated his work as a travelogue mainly focused on Mexican antiquities (Van Riper 2004). More recent scholarship, however, has highlighted Anahuac’s ethnographic thrust and content (Sera-Shriar 2011, 2013; Di Brizio 2017; Lacroix 2022). Such reinterpretations have been favourably received by Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han Vermeulen, who have included Anahuac in the ethnographical canon (Rosa and Vermeulen 2022).

My paper argues that the recent, contrasting interpretations of Anahuac call for a reappraisal of the observational foundations of Tylor’s first book, as well as for a more general historiographical reflection on anthropological research practices and forms of discursive knowledge-production, most notably ethnography. My contention is that by recognizing the historical variability of disciplinary observational strategies and by carefully contextualising them, we may be able to recapture past forms of anthropological knowledge and explore long neglected early ethnographies.

Paper short abstract:

Starting from 1878 Bartolomeo Malfatti’s handbook 'Etnografia' (Ethnography), the paper discusses the trajectory of ethnography in Italy, its trans/national formation, and different declinations, to critically reflect upon the meanings of “doing ethnography” in the long nineteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

In 1878 appeared the first Italian handbook dedicated to the field of Etnografia (ethnography) by Bartolomeo Malfatti (1828-1892). The book expressed the need to configure ethnography as an autonomous discipline freed from biological determinism and aimed at the search for an appropriate research method and specialized knowledge. Although set in an evolutionist framework, Malfatti presented ethnography in contraposition to anthropology – as a “scienza storica delle genti” (“historical science of peoples”) diverging from the medical and biological-naturalist conceptions prevailing in late nineteenth-century Italy thanks to Paolo Mantegazza’s Florentine school of anthropology (Puccini 2011).

Following the lessons of Adriano Balbi and Giovenale Vegezzi Ruscalla, as well as Carlo Cattaneo and Gabriele Rosa, Malfatti offered an organic and complete systematization of ethnography as a research program linked to early nineteenth-century geographical, historical, and philological studies influenced by the German scholarship of Theodor Waitz, Friedrich Müller, Oscar Peschel, Lorenz Dieffenbach, Maximilian Perty, M.L. Frankenheim, and Georg Gerland. In Malfatti’s approach, ethnography deals primarily with peoples and their language, psychic life, social order, customs, trade, religions, myths, and migrations. The need to clarify the statute of ethnography as separate from anthropology would arise again in the 1910s, following Lamberto Loria’s foundation of Italian ethnography on the basis of his fieldwork experience.

Starting from Malfatti and driving from the Italian ethnographic archive, the paper discusses the trajectory of ethnography in Italy, its trans/national formation, and different declinations, to critically reflect upon the meanings of “doing ethnography” in the long nineteenth century.