mediastudies.press invites you to join Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and Yves Winkin for the launch of the Goffman in the Open book series. The free, one-hour online event will highlight the first three books in the series: Winkin’s From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (2026), Leeds-Hurwitz’s Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College (2025), and Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, Communication Conduct in an Island Community…

Philippe Descola The Composition of Worlds: Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier Polity Press, 2023 224 pages, bibliography, notes, index In April 2023 the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Dar…

An exchange between Philippe Descola and Bruno Karsenti Translated by John Tresch The editors of HAR are happy to present a recent lecture by anthropologist Philippe Descola, followed by an exchang…

The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) is pleased to announce its second competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of…

Grażyna Kubica and Dariusz Brzeziński (Eds.) Bronisław Malinowski and His Legacy in Contemporary Social Sciences and Humanities: On the Centenary of Argonauts of the Western Pacific Routledge, 2024 286 pages, 6 b/w illustrations, notes, index The introduction of this edited volume could serve as an alternative title for it: “Revisiting the Life and Work of Bronisław Malinowski: On the Centenary of…

After witnessing the “intolerable” “negro legislature” of the Reconstruction era, which his services as a chemist for the Confederate Government during the Civil War were ineffective in preventing, Joseph LeConte was relieved to accept a position as a professor of geology at the newly-founded University of California in 1868 (LeConte and Armes 1903, 238). In the fall of 1869 LeConte left his job at the University of South Carolina and journeyed to the burgeoning state of California.

This bibliographic essay samples the available literature, which is vast (in English and Turkish), on the relationship of archaeology and museums to successive political ideologies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Anatolia. Building on insights from the overview of the available literature, this essay will provide a curated list of further related readings.

The Commission on the History of Anthropology (CHOA) is now accepting panel proposals and additional submissions for the 2027 meeting of the World Anthropology Union Congress which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, from 31 August to 4 September 2027. Please find details and a note of welcome below from Celso Castro and Frederico Delgado Rosa.

The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) is pleased to announce its second competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division that provides a gathering place for discussions of the history of anthropology and the human sciences.  This prize will be awarded to a paper about the history of anthropology, broadly construed.

We have added twenty-one new items to HAR's bibliography of references. Three authors new to our Bibliography are Marija Brujac, an anthropologist at the University of Belgrade; Amurabi Oliveira, a Brazilian sociologist; and Jan Karlach, an ethnographer at the Czech Academy of Sciences. We have also included a series of reflections in honor of the late Robert Brightman, which were recently published in the Journal of Anthropological Research.

Richard L. Anderson is, in my view, the most respected and influential aesthetic anthropologist alive today (see Anderson 1979, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2015, 2021, 2023). I first met him in the 1980s when I was teaching a course called Creativity and Society at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, using one of his works (1979) as a required text. He was teaching in the Liberal Arts section of the Kansas City Art Institute, a mere hour’s drive away, so I invited him to come and speak to my class.

The Joint Meeting of the European Society for the History of Science/ History of Science Society will be held in-person in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom from July 13-16, 2026. The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels, session locations, abstracts, and additional details can be found in the…

Johannes F. M. Schick, Mario Schmidt, and Martin Zillinger (Eds.) The Social Origins of Thought: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project Berghahn Books, 2022 Methodology & History in Anthropology Series (vol. 43) 332 pages, 6 figures, notes, references, bibliographies, index The “category project”—seeded by Émile Durkheim’s foundational work on collective representations and growing through the pages of the Année Sociologique…

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on the complex career of a giant in anthropology. Golub, Alex, 2026. “Marshall Sahlins: A Life of Transformations,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on women ethnographers at the Musée d'ethnographic du Trocadéro and the Musée de l'Homme. Brassard, Sylvie, 2026. “French Women Abroad: Fieldwork Impediments for Women of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée de l’Homme (1928–1945),” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English and Portuguese) on the trajectory—and the potentially global reach—of a key figure in the history of Brazilian anthropology. Ribeiro Corossacz, Valeria, 2026. “Lélia Gonzalez’s Contribution to Decolonizing Anthropological Thought in Brazil and Beyond,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie…

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on the ways in which science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, the daughter of two major figures, was herself engaged with anthropology in her writings. Grillot, Thomas, 2026. “‘The Daughter of the Great Kroeber’: Ursula Le Guin and the Literary Usefulness of Anthropology,”

Islandia is a rare bird, a great utopian novel and a brilliant treatise on cross-cultural interpretation. Having gained some cachet after its publication in 1942 among readers of sci-fi and fantasy, it was reprinted in 1958, 1966, 1970, and 1975, this last with a cover in psychedelic colors.[1] But it seems to have fallen into oblivion. That is a shame.

The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) is pleased to announce its second competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division that provides a gathering place for discussions of the history of anthropology and the human sciences. This prize will be awarded to a paper about the history of anthropology, broadly construed.

“The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness…

Hugh Macmillan Max Gluckman Berghahn Books, 2024 Anthropology’s Ancestors Series (vol. 6) 184 pages, 11 illus., bibl., index This biography of Max Gluckman (1911-1975) is part of a series of pocket introductions to major figures in Euro-American Anthropology. From what I can gather, having now read a couple of them, its editor, Aleksandar Bošković, does not ask authors for much more than a clear, concise life and thoughtful narrative of its hero, which Hugh Macmillan certainly delivers.

We have added twenty-four new items to HAR's bibliography of references. This includes several recently published edited volumes such as the second installment in the Franz Boas Papers series on James Teit (Laforet et al. 2024) and Fabrics of Anthropological Knowledge: Changing Perspectives in Europe and Beyond (Birkalan-Gedik and Dimpflmeier 2025).

Lisbon hosts, from May 13 to 15, 2026, the international conference Histories of Anthropology and Restitutions,a gathering that examines—through the lens of disciplinary history—a topic that has become unavoidable in the fields of heritage and the humanities: restitution. Far from being limited to the return of objects to their places of origin, the conference proposes to think of restitution as a set of processes that also involves knowledge, words, sounds, and images embedded in ethnographic and anthropological collections and archives—and that may produce unforeseen effects and outcomes, not always reducible to the material act of returning.

A new Fieldsights dossier, Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata: Histories of Environmental Anthropology, is now available from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. This series of essays is the result of the April 2025 conference, Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures organized by the History of Anthropology Review in collaboration with Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program, held in New Haven.

On 12 February 2026, the World Anthropological Union (WAU), through its scientific chamber, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), established the IUAES Commission on the History of Anthropology (CHOA), addressing a thematic gap among existing commissions. The Chair and Deputy Chair of the new IAEUS Commission on the History of Anthropology are, respectively, Celso Castro (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Nova University, Lisbon).

Time Work. Debt, inheritance, and intergenerational practice Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, knowledge bearers, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember.

While anthropology has produced a vast body of published work, far more remains unpublished. Begun in 2025, Anthropology’s Lost Library (ALL) will soon be offering a digital home for anthropological writings that were intended for scholarly and public consumption but were never completed—essays, books, and articles; theses and dissertation chapters; grant applications, journalistic pieces, and op-eds. Though ALL is still taking shape, the repository will be designed both to offer a stable and searchable home for these works and also to contribute broadly to the study of anthropology and its histories by documenting the reasons why these works were never ultimately published.

The “Forum on Anthropology and Literature” at next year’s Modern Language Association conference, which will be held in Los Angeles (January 7-10, 2027), is seeking papers for history of anthropology related sessions.

This past fall, the History of Anthropology Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association awarded its inaugural Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize to Nala K. Williams, doctoral candidate in anthropology and Black Studies at Yale University, for the paper “‘Feather-Bed Resistance’ and Racial Vindication in Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey.” In an exceptionally well-researched and well-argued paper, Williams profiles the intellectual and professional journey of Eslanda Robeson, a Black expatriate American anthropologist who trained at the London School of Economics in the 1930s and subsequently authored a multi-genre ethnography entitled…

An invitation for all working on the history of anthropology, broadly construed: Are you reading and writing about classic anthropology texts in courses or research? Do you use primary sources created by anthropologists in your scholarship? Is your work concerned with definitions and classifications of human kinds, or are you reckoning with legacies of anthropological fieldwork or collections in the present?

Sonali Thakkar The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought Stanford University Press 288 pages, notes, bibliography, index As a title, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Racism in Postcolonial Thought is refreshing, in that it identifies as a keyword not a supposed religion (“Judaism”) nor yet an ascription to a certain set of humans (“Jews”), but rather a powerful cultural construction that is the shared product of those who identify with “Jewishness” and those who do not.

There are signs of a Goffmanian turn in political economy, alongside renewed interest in the biographical trajectory of Goffman himself. What are, or could be, the hallmarks of a Goffmanian political economy? How did political economy concerns and questions figure in Goffman's work and thought? What might the systematic incorporation into political economy scholarship (broadly defined) of Goffmanian concepts and sensibilities look like?

This workshop, timed to follow the Economic History Society conference, aims to bring together scholars who have engaged with the Murdock Atlas in their research, and who are interested in an open, cross-disciplinary, and forward-looking conversation on the merits, limitations, and pitfalls of using the Atlas in social science research.

Panel P083 "Beyond Polarised Histories of Anthropologies: Female Ethnographers and Folklorists between the Mid-19th and Early 20th Centuries " will be held in hybrid format at the EASA2026 Conference "Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World", Poznań, Poland, 21-24 July 2026. Coordinated by Fabiana Dimpflmeier (Gabriele d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara), Maria Beatrice Di Brizio (Centro di Ricerca MODI - Università di Bologna), and Elena Emma Sottilotta (University of Cambridge) the panel aims to overcome polarised histories of anthropologies, exploring the multiple roles of female scholars in the development of the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on a fundamental Indigenous figure in the history of European ethnographic expeditions in late 19th-century Amazonia. BEROSE reference: Petschelies, Erik, 2025. “A Portrait of Antônio Bakairi: Indigenous Agency and the Politics of Ethnographic Knowledge in Late‑19th‑Century Amazonia,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in French) on how Cuban museums represent slavery and African cultural legacies. BEROSE reference: Toutain, Maxime, 2025. « De l’altérité à la communauté. L’esclavage et ses héritages dans les musées cubains (1913-1986) », Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on the ambiguous collecting practices of the German ethnographer Günter Tessmann. BEROSE reference: Fürniss, Susanne, Kathrin Grotz & Patricia Rahemipour, 2025. “Colonial ‘Collecting’ and the Creation of ‘Collectibles’: Günter Tessmann in Kamerun (1904–1909),” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) presenting the history of Afro-Brazilian religious studies from a fresh perspective. A Portuguese version is also available. BEROSE Reference: Morais, Mariana Ramos de, 2025. “Afro-Religious Anthropology at the Crossroads: Towards Other Histories of the Discipline in Brazil,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie.

Twenty four new bibliographic references relevant for research into the history of anthropology have been added to HAR's bibliography page. Authors appearing here for the first time include Gwyneira Isaac, David Nugent, and Norman E. Witten, Jr. Two recent doctoral dissertations, by William Eck and Tugba Batuhan, have also been added. 

Presented by The University of Maryland Center for Archival Futures; The Bentley Historical Library and University of Michigan School of Information; the University of Missouri’s iSchool; and the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR), and Wikimedia DC. Are you interested in the history of anthropology? In archival representation, outreach, and linked data? In FAIR and CARE…

Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, Thursday, 11 June & Friday,12 June 2026 This two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross-disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, design, history, international relations, law, linguistics, and urban studies.

The History of Anthropology Working Group at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine invites proposals for our Winter/Spring 2026 sessions (January–June). Our meetings provide a collegial space for sharing work in progress, and for receiving constructive feedback from fellow historians of anthropology. We especially welcome papers that invite conversation across different regions, methods, or traditions. Those who are interested can submit proposals using this survey by 15 December 2025, PST. More information about the group is available here.