Paper short abstract:

Based on a double experience of conducting fieldwork and writing historical studies (in Native American, Arctic, and Oceanian topics), I will discuss aspects of methodology in an attempt to achieve socially more engaged ways of writing the history of anthropology in one’s own country (Hungary).

Paper long abstract:

This talk is based on a double experience of mine as a researcher, anthropologist as well as historian. On one hand, it relies on a former study of mine, entitled ’No Visitors Beyond This Point:’ Rules of Conduct for Tourists in Native American Reservations and Their Cultural-Political Contexts in the USA”, published in 2017. On the other hand, it draws on some of the methodological lessons and conclusions of my earlier historical studies about Native American, Arctic, and Oceanian topics. I have been exploring the representation of indigenous peoples by European, in my case, Hungarian authors in the 17th-19th century, paganised, demonised, barbarised, and exoticised representations through the lense of which European authors approached non-European otherness. Those representations reached the early modern Kingdom of Hungary too, by means of translations, compilations and other ways of textual – and visual - transmission. Applying the suggestions of indigenous scholars (Fixico, Mihesuah and others) I would argue that the dichotomy discussed by G. Stocking between a ’historicist’ and a ’presentist’ approach in writing the history of (local) anthropologies can be challenged, and can perhaps be diminished by a socially more sensitive thinking and writing about indigenous peoples. I would like to talk about some of my own methodological observations (also, dilemmas) in order to achieve a more self-reflexive, more responsible, socially more engaged way of writing the history of anthropology in one’s own country.

Paper short abstract:

In his speech on race in America, Former President Obama paraphrased a quote from Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” How do we as historians of anthropology learn from the past and help shape the future? and how do we do this responsibly and ethically?

Paper long abstract:

In his 2008 speech on race in America, Former President Obama paraphrased a quote from Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” The past reaches out to us as a legacy, and it links us to the future as an obligation. How do we as historians of anthropology draw from the past responsibly and ethically?

I will use my own research on Franz Boas as a case study. Boas shaped our contemporary present both in the U.S. and internationally. His concerns are not dead and are not buried. My work on Boas has been grounded in the detail of the “spoken word,” spoken through writing, largely through archival correspondence.

My frustration with works on Boas has to do with a careless use of historical material. Leslie White, for instance, carved in stone the idea that Boas did little fieldwork. But in his inventory of Boas’s fieldwork, White did not include Boas’s Baffin Land (1883–1884) work, or his work in Mexico, Puerto Rico, or in the U.S. Southwest. Another frustration for me is the current work on race. Mark Anderson in From Boas to Black Power (2019) makes only brief mention of Boas’s foundational and seminal work, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” (1911). Anderson did not discuss Boas’s 1894, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race.” It is this looseness with the facts that renders a distorted account, which does not honor or represent history.

Paper short abstract:

What returns can history of anthropology offer to communities who have repeatedly been subjects of inquiry? Examining A’uwẽ-Xavante Elders’ perspectives, the challenges they pose to temporalities of history, and a collaborative digital archive project, this paper explores possible futures.

Paper long abstract:

"Return" has many meanings: a homecoming, a journey repeated, the profit of a long-term investment, the restoration of an object to its keeper. What returns can history of anthropology offer to communities and peoples who have repeatedly been objects or subjects of inquiry? Drawing on articulations from A’uwẽ-Xavante Elders of the importance of "knowing the history" of anthropologists and other scholars who have visited and documented them and their lands, our field's separation between historicist and presentist practice is unsettled. Past actions are still present in memories and material traces that bear political weight and might facilitate returns. This paper explores the challenges these Elders posed to temporal distinctions inherent in my methodology and conception of history, and a resulting digital archive project that opens up old materials and relationships for the composition of new histories. It considers the archive as a pluripotent tool for envisioning and reconfiguring research in the future as well as delineating limits of what non-A’uwẽ anthropologists and historians should know and do. I suggest we expand our category of historians of anthropology to include not only those practitioners who examine their field with a historical eye, but also the subjects of that research who understand, narrate, and use these histories in diverse ways; this offers new routes for thought and action.