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Paper short abstract

This paper examines history of anthropology textbooks as a case study in intellectual polarization, tracing how the clash between George Stocking’s historicism and Marvin Harris’s presentism shaped an enduring debate over how the discipline’s past should be written and taught.

Paper long abstract

George W. Stocking’s influential critique of presentism in the historiography of anthropology (1965) famously advocated understanding the past on its own terms, even while acknowledging the inescapable situatedness of historical interpretation. Although later commentators have emphasized Stocking’s acceptance of an “enlightened presentism,” one dimension of his position merits renewed attention: his sustained distrust of textbooks on the history of anthropology written by practicing anthropologists rather than professional historians. For Stocking, such works risked unreflective presentism, weak contextualization, overreliance on canonical texts, and insufficient engagement with archival materials. This paper examines the textbook tradition as a privileged site in which tensions between historicism and presentism have been repeatedly polarized and negotiated since the late 1960s. Beginning with the emblematic confrontation between Stocking and Marvin Harris over the latter’s The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), I trace how this debate became a reference point for subsequent textbooks in the US and beyond. Drawing on a comparative reading of more than twenty-five history of anthropology textbooks in five languages, the paper analyzes how authors positioned themselves vis-à-vis this historiographical divide. By situating the textbook tradition itself as a case study in polarized anthropology, the paper ultimately argues that these textbooks function less as stable embodiments of one position or the other than as ambivalent expressions within a debate still shaped today by conflicting theoretical, methodological—and political—commitments.