2018 (page 1 of 3)

Special Focus: História dos Índios no Brasil Dossiê

This dossier features seven of the forty papers presented at the colloquium 25 anos de História dos Índios no Brasil: balanços e perspectivas da história indígena. The event was held between December 11 and 13, 2017 in the Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and organized by the Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (USP) and the Centro de Pesquisa em Etnologia Indígena of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark edited volume, Historia dos Índios no Brasil, assembled by anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, researchers and Indigenous people came together to reflect on the state of the field of Indigenous history in Brazil.

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Editor’s Introduction: Indigenous History and Anthropology in Brazil

The 1992 publication of the volume História dos Índios no Brasil edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha marked a turning point in scholarship on Indigenous peoples in Brazilian history and anthropology. Featuring works by twenty-seven leading scholars across the fields of social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, archeology, and genetics, it established a new baseline in the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous history.[1] Continue reading

Introduction: 25 years of História dos Índios no Brasil: Balances and Perspectives on Indigenous History

This dossier features seven of the forty papers presented at the colloquium 25 anos de História dos Índios no Brasil: balanços e perspectivas da história indígena. The event was held between December 11 and 13, 2017 in the Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and organized by the Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (USP) and the Centro de Pesquisa em Etnologia Indígena of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark edited volume, Historia dos Índios no Brasil, assembled by anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, researchers and Indigenous people came together to reflect on the state of the field of Indigenous history in Brazil. Continue reading

Why Did We Publish a Book about Indigenous Peoples’ History in Brazil in 1992?

There are many ways to answer that question. A simple if not simplistic one is to recall that Indigenous history had been largely ignored in Brazil, based on a mishmash of half-cooked ideas. The Brazilian historian, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, dismissed its very possibility in 1854 on the grounds that Indigenous peoples were stuck in an inescapable infancy: hence they had no history and were to be left to the care of ethnography. A century later, it was argued that, having no writing systems, they had produced no historical documents. Then, widespread and gross misinterpretations of the notion of “cold societies” led many to position Indigenous peoples against history. Continue reading

Indigenous History and Land Rights in the Rio Branco Valley, Northern Brazil: An Assessment

The volume História dos Índios no Brasil (da Cunha 1992) is the hallmark of a theoretical and methodological renewal in the historiography of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, a momentum which we are glad to be part of as authors and contributors. It is also iconic of Brazilian scholars’ commitment to the official acknowledgment of the political and land rights of Indigenous peoples. In circumstances very similar to the birth of ethnohistory in the United States during the 1940s (see Trigger 1982), the academic field of Indigenous history in Brazil consolidated in the 1980s as an answer to the political challenge of proving the historical basis for Indigenous land rights.[1] In those years, the military dictatorship took steps towards a restricted and controversial land demarcation process, which aimed to liberate lands for economic exploration, notably in opening areas of Amazonia. This meant a potential blow to Indigenous land rights claims. In reaction, Indigenous peoples established political organizations and activist movements in the 1980s. Many land demarcation cases were then taken to court, and historical evidence was crucial to guarantee constitutional Indigenous land rights (for a detailed account, see da Cunha and Barbosa 2018). Continue reading

On the Trail of Merandolino

Contemporary distribution of Indigenous peoples in the Lower Tapajos and Arapiuns valleys (Leandro Mahalem de Lima, 2018)

This piece is a case study about river-based communities adjacent to the Amazon River, and an account of their claims for Indigenous recognition since the mid-1990s. I focus on the Lower Rio Tapajos and Rio Arapiuns region, in Santarem, Pará State, Brazil, where I conducted ethnographical studies between 2008 and 2015. I trace aspects of the process of Indigenous political mobilization and its connection to Indigenous history and anthropology, focusing on the legendary and historical shaman, Merandolino, whose rediscovered history is now connecting disparate places and times. Continue reading

Indigenous Labor in Native and Brazilian Colonial History: A Historiographic Assessment

Indigenous labor and Indigenous slavery have occupied a minor place in analyses of Brazilian colonial history. Despite the fact that labor is omnipresent in social relations and is the material basis of the reproduction of societies, historians of Brazilian colonialism abandoned it as an analytic category decades ago in favor of themes such as memory and identity. This phenomenon is neither restricted to Brazil, nor to Indigenous studies, although this essay will focus on examples of Brazilian colonial and Native history.[1] Recent developments in studies of Native history were made possible by the opening of a dialogue between history and anthropology. However, Native history became a field apart and closed in on itself, with practitioners abandoning the analysis of broader historical processes and limiting their aims to the affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ agency. This affirmation fulfilled an important function, but the field should now broaden the range of questions it addresses, seeking a larger dialogue with history to attend to a new political context. Continue reading

Transformations of Mura Territoriality in the Amazon

“The Mura are everywhere,” a Mura leader, or tuxáua, of Piranha village, said to me. This statement, made during my very first days of fieldwork in Terra Indígena Cunhã-Sapucaia, highlighted the paradox of the Mura territoriality in the Amazon. This essay examines questions of Mura territoriality and mobility, and the construction and implementation of the categories used to describe and delimit Mura space. I begin with an analysis of the anthropological literature and its role in documenting bureaucratic state attempts to administrate Mura affairs. Next, I turn to the work of Mura tuxáua, teachers, and activists, who are disrupting and reclaiming old categories in the service of new claims to sovereignty. Drawing on Gallois’ conception of territoriality (2004), which considers the cultural particularities of Indigenous peoples’ relations to space in the context of contact, I explore how Mura conceptions of space are intimately tied up with the memory and mobility of ancestors, kin whose presence is still felt and known through the land. Continue reading

Archives of the Future: Issues for the Custody of Recent Documentation Concerning Indigenous Peoples in Brazil

Twenty-five years ago, Brazilian scholars came together to publish História dos Índios no Brasil. The book consolidated the work of a generation trained in the post-graduate anthropology programs established in the late sixties. While facing the repression of the military regime (1964-1985) these scholars established anthropological and historical methods, valid to this day, that are at the same time theoretically robust and legally effective in securing the rights of Indigenous people to their land and their histories in Brazil. This paradigm was the product of an implicated anthropology (Albert 1995), where scholars and Indigenous peoples fight a common struggle against the deep-seated colonial dynamics of economic expansion.[1] Continue reading

Desconstruindo a história contada até pouco tempo atrás / To Deconstruct the History That Was Told Until Recently

Quem sou, qual minha metade, de onde eu venho?

Who am I, what is my moiety, and where do I come from?
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Funding Opportunity: 2019-2020 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) Opportunities at the American Philosophical Society

The American Philosophical Society invites applications for predoctoral, postdoctoral, and short-term research fellowships and internships from scholars at all stages of their careers, especially Native American scholars in training, tribal college and university faculty members, and other scholars working closely with Native communities on projects in Native American and Indigenous Studies and related fields and disciplines. These funding opportunities are supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI). Fellows and interns will be associated with the APS’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), which promotes greater collaboration among scholars, archives, and Indigenous communities. More information about these opportunities can be found below.

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Resource: New Content in HAN’s Bibliography

The History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN) is pleased to announce the addition of new items to our Bibliography section. This section features citations of recently published works (stretching back to 2013) in all formats that are relevant to the history of anthropology. A full list of the new titles added can be found below. More information on our latest bibliography entries can be found here.

HAN welcomes bibliography suggestions from our readers. If you come across a title of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.

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Funding Opportunity: Adrian Research Fellowship

Thanks to a generous original donation from Trinity College, Cambridge,
Darwin College intends to elect a stipendiary Adrian Research Fellow in the history or anthropology of science or medicine in societies and cultures other than the modern West, if a suitable candidate applies. More information about this opportunity can be found below.

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‘The Pursuit of Ruins’ by Christina Bueno

Christina Bueno. The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico. 280pp., 23 illus., 3 maps, notes, bibl., index. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. $95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper), $29.95 (eBook)

Christina Bueno’s The Pursuit of Ruins provides an engaging and comprehensive account of the development of archaeology as a national, modernizing project in Porfirian (late nineteenth and early twentieth century) Mexico. The volume is well-researched, extremely readable, and resonates well with much of the scholarship on the history of archaeology that has emerged in recent years. I recommend it as an introduction not only to the history of archaeology and “the past” in Mexico, but also as a useful comparative work for scholarship on the history of archaeology elsewhere in the world, which often seems to ignore the discipline’s development outside of Euro-America, the Mediterranean, and South Asia.[1] As Bueno notes, debate about whether Latin American countries “are postcolonial nations” is ongoing (8). The Pursuit of Ruins reveals the merits of a postcolonial perspective in the Mexican case.

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Searching for Boas in the Archives

In summer 1996 I had the good fortune to spend four weeks at the American Philosophical Society (APS) soaking myself in the Franz Boas archives there. The APS contains the bulk of Boas’s enormous correspondence, though hardly everything.[1] Aside from the fact that there is something special about holding the original documents in one’s hands (very carefully), there is much more Boas material in the APS besides these letters. There are, for example, translations from the German of early family correspondence as well as notes for several lecture series he delivered, and a story Boas wrote and illustrated for his children recounting his adventures in Baffinland. Continue reading

Amelia Louise Susman Schultz, Sam Blowsnake, and the Ho-Chunk Syllabary

The History of Anthropology Newsletter is partnering with the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) to publish here here for the first time a 1940 syllabary for the Ho-Chunk language—a transcription of sound combinations and words for writing the Ho-Chunk language[1] This valuable document, held in manuscript at the APS, was created through the collaboration of Sam Blowsnake and linguistic anthropologist Amelia Susman. Blowsnake wrote the story of his life using this syllabary for his autobiography, Crashing Thunder, published in 1920 with the assistance of Winnebago anthropologist and dissenting Boasian Paul Radin.[2]

The life and works of Amelia Susman, Franz Boas’s last Ph.D. student— currently 103 years old— will be less familiar to most. Continue reading

Can Humanity be Mapped? Adolf Bastian, Friedrich Ratzel and the Cartography of Culture

Introduction: Image and Science in Early Ethnology

During the second half of the nineteenth century, in German circles linked to anthropology, a movement of scientific systematization arose from the need to cope, scientifically and institutionally, with the great masses of data that had been collected over nearly a century of colonial enterprises and geographical discoveries. The most important German cities—Berlin, Bonn and Leipzig—laid a foundation of museums, learned societies, academies and scientific journals to set the agenda and limits for a new discipline: ethnology. Ethnology was supposed to develop a new knowledge of man as a being capable of culture. Mediating between ethnographic practices and anthropological science, ethnology at this time was difficult to distinguish from physiology and the study of man as a physical being , which were part of the natural sciences. In the struggle to attain the status of “science,” anthropology had credentials as good as any nineteenth century discipline, because of its early commitment to physiology and adoption of statistical tools. But it was also the first human science to question substantially the adequateness of the scientific method and the pretension of objectivity as it involved very unstable research materials focused on human culture and behavior.[1]

This essay will analyze the case of two founders of German anthropology, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), and examine the challenges they faced in creating images to use as scientific tools in their ethnological approaches. The absence of descriptive, paradigmatic and documentary image tools in the major ethnology handbooks of the time stands in contrast to the clear awareness of anthropologists of the urgent need to codify a coherent and comprehensive system of representations, and to give a symbolic account of the complex results of their discipline.

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History of Anthropology Panels at EASA 2018: Conference Report

From 14-17 August 2018, Stockholm University in Sweden hosted the 15th biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). This year’s conference included four panels on the history of anthropology, as well as one session on a fifth panel, for a total of 38 papers on different aspects of the field’s history. This large number of papers suggests an upsurge of interest in the subject in Europe and worldwide. Since its reactivation in 2016, EASA’s History of Anthropology Network (HOAN) has aimed at facilitating this process, and its membership has nearly doubled since early 2017. All panels on the history of anthropology during this EASA conference were convened by members of HOAN; two of the panels were organized under the auspices of this network. Continue reading

Event: History of Anthropology at the AAA, San Jose, CA, November 14-18 2018

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will take place November 14-18 2018 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Here is a list of sessions and events relevant to the history of anthropology:

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HSS History of Anthropology Happy Hour, 2 November 2018

In the spirit of the History of Science Society’s Annual Meeting, the History of Anthropology Newsletter will be hosting an informal gathering on Friday, Nov. 2 from 7:15-8:00 at Fado’s Irish Pub (801 1st Ave, Seattle).

All HSS attendees interested in issues related to the history of anthropology are invited to attend!

Event: History of Anthropology at HSS, Seattle, WA, November 1-4, 2018

The annual meeting of the History of Science Society (HSS) will take place November 1-4 at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. Here is a list of sessions and events relevant to the history of anthropology:

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Land Acknowledgement Ceremony & Plenary Roundtable: Knowledge/Violence/Futures: History of Science and its Genealogies
18:00-19:29, Room: Willow
Co-Organized by Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto)

  • Joseph Masco (University of Chicago)
  • Kim TallBear (University of Alberta)
  • Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto)
  • Dr. Pablo Gómez (University of Wisconsin Madison)

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‘The School of Oriental and African Studies’ by Ian Brown: A “Director’s Office View” of History

Ian Brown. The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning. 346 pp., 27 b/w illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Ian Brown’s The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning is a welcome addition to the literature on higher education in Britain, and particularly to the small but important body of work on SOAS (as it is now officially known). While SOAS has produced festschrifts for particular professors, and a few “corridor histories,” such as SOAS Since the Sixties and SOAS: A Celebration in Many Voices,[1] the school lacks the kind of intensive memorialization that one finds in say, Oxford and Cambridge. This is particularly true in anthropology where journals such as Cambridge Anthropology and the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford feature extensive obituaries and testimonies of staff. Brown’s new volume is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the history of SOAS, especially because the other SOAS histories are out of print.

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Event: Workshop on Ethics, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in the History of the Human Sciences, University of Washington, 4 November 2018

On November 4, 2018 the University of Washington’s Walter Chapin Simpson Centre for the Humanities will be hosting a special workshop on Ethics, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in the History of the Human Sciences.

Taking place from 9:30-4:30pm in Communications Building 202, this workshop will explore how historians of science and others might assess the ethical breaches and conundrums that took place in the past as researchers in the human sciences carried out investigations of and on “the other.”

A full description of the workshop can be found below.

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New Opportunity: Graduate Programs in HPS and Biology and Society at ASU

Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences has announced a series of graduate programs in Biology and Society (MS; PhD) and the History and Philosophy of Science (PhD).

As part of the Biology and Society or History and Philosophy of Science programs, students have the opportunity to work closely with researchers in many disciplines, such as biology, medicine, economics, ethics, philosophy, history and public policy, to develop a strong foundation of knowledge and scholarship.

More information on these programs can be found here.

Event: MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar, Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 16-21 May 2019,

From May 16-21, 2019 the Marine Biological Laboratory and Arizona State University are holding their Annual History of Biology Seminar at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Titled,  “Uncovering the Logic of Regeneration across Complex Living Systems,” this seminar will bring togeather historians, philosophers, social scientists and biologists for a lively and intense week of presentations and discussions on how microbial communities, organisms and ecosystems maintain some capacity to repair and to maintain themselves in the face of events that cause disturbances or damage.

Applications for this seminar are due on February 1, 2019.

More information about the seminar’s theme and application process can be found here.

 

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