Hannah McElgunn, John Leavitt, Sean O’Neill, Anthony K. Webster, and Morgan Siewert

The Many (After)lives of Benjamin Lee Whorf

Journal of Anthropological Research special issue, Vol. 80, No. 4, Winter 2024

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) was one of the most intellectually creative and—with a degree in chemical engineering and a career as an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company—oddly credentialed and occupationally unusual members of the Boasian group of North American anthropologists. I have long considered his essay on “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” (1941) as that rarest of scholarly productions: a brilliant analysis realized as a perfect work of art. Yet, as John Leavitt observes in his contribution to the collection under review here, Whorf became “one of the great straw men for the universalist cognitive sciences of the 1970s and 1980s” (409), fodder for what Whorf himself might have called Standard Average European (SAE) psychology, whose practitioners never understood that the Boasians’ suggestions about the relation of language to culture grew from studies of grammatical categories, not words by themselves.

Frédéric Keck

How French Moderns Think: The Lévy-Bruhl Family, From “Primitive Mentality” to Contemporary Pandemics

With a foreword by Michael M. J. Fischer

HAU Books, 2023

215 pages, 8 halftones, references, bibliographies of individual Lévy-Bruhl family members, indices of names and notions

How French Moderns Think is at least three things.  First, it is an intellectual biography of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his descendants, told as the story of shared concerns across four generations under the sign of the French sociological tradition.  Second, the book follows the seemingly endless ripples of the Dreyfus Affair and its attendant antisemitism across French civil and intellectual life, which in no small way shaped Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking of “mentalities” (primitive, modern, or otherwise) as well as the inherited focus on chance and justice passed down in the Lévy-Bruhl family.  Third, the book is a careful genealogy of thinking about the ways through which explanations arrive, social realities form, and attention and action (vigilance) flow from sociological and anthropological knowledge—a story that begins with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and ends with the book’s author.  How French Moderns Think, translated from an earlier version in French, Préparer l’imprévisible: Lévy-Bruhl et les sciences de la vigilance (Presses Universitaires de France, 2023), extends many of the arguments on the political relevance of Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of vigilance that began in Keck’s earlier book and thesis, Lévy-Bruhl: Entre philosophie et anthropologie (CNRS, 2008).

Tony Platt

The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley

Heyday, 2023

xxi + 289 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index

At the American Anthropological Association’s yearly meeting in Toronto, 2023, small stickers were available with slogans including “Decolonize anthropology,” “Like a Boas,” “Channeling Zora,” and “It’s OUR responsibility.” But anthropologists’ anxious relationship to the history of our field will not be resolved with a sticker. Debates over how to reckon with anthropology’s past carry on.

Tony Platt’s book The Scandal of Cal (2023) joins scholarship dedicated to uncovering connections between higher education (including anthropology), settler colonialism, slavery and racist legacies, particularly in the US (cf. Anbert 2024; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioğlu 2018; la paperson 2017; Stein 2022; Wilder 2013). Platt is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley and a founder of the Berkeley Truth and Justice Project that began in 2020. The book is a polemical retelling of UC Berkeley’s history. It makes broad connections between the Manhattan project and the destruction of Indigenous lands near Los Alamos, UC Berkeley scientists’ involvement in developing the atomic bomb, the lack of memorials on campus to civilian lives in Japan and Indigenous lives in California, eugenics, and the hoarding of Indigenous artifacts and human remains. The concept of “connections” though, remains vague: which connections have been omitted? Can just about anything be understood as a connection?

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 Darmanin, decided to “dissolve” Les Soulèvements de la Terre, an environmental collective that shares many parallels with Extinction Rebellion. In a news magazine controlled by Vincent Bolloré, a Catholic billionaire and France’s prime facilitator of climate skepticism and far-right propaganda, he went so far as to accuse those who inspired the movement of “intellectual terrorism.” Not intimidated by this underhanded move of a leading politician, two dozen Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters, including high-profile ones such as Greta Thunberg and Philippe Descola, gathered in front of the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme court for administrative justice. Their protest was effective; at least, the Conseil temporarily suspended the dissolution. And the environmental collective, notwithstanding the Minister’s shameless and all-too-blatant ruse to associate it with ecoterrorism, remains very much alive and kicking.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Duke University Press, 2023

272 pages, 47 illustrations, notes, bibliography, index

Editors’ Introduction

HAR is pleased to present this roundtable review of Bernard Geoghegan’s recently published Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. This roundtable came about when multiple scholars expressed their interest in reviewing the book. We took the opportunity to craft three questions that we could pose to five scholars who offer different anthropological and historical perspectives. Below, we present this roundtable by question, by discussant, and with a response from the author. We are extremely grateful to all of our contributors for their commitment to this roundtable over many months and for sharing their thoughts with HAR readers.

Roundtable by Question

What new actors does Code bring into the history of the discipline that you study/practice? How does it change the way we think about the relationship between the human sciences and various forms of asymmetric international power in the 20th and 21st centuries?

Is there anything in the ambitious cybernetic vision/dream of the postwar order that is worth keeping—that helps your discipline of study/practice cope with large scale questions we face today?

What does the digital/AI future of your discipline look like, and how might the history told in Code help navigate that future?

Roundtable by Discussant

Ekaterina Babintseva, Department of History, Purdue University

Samuel Gerald Collins, Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminal Justice, Towson University

Martha Lampland, Department of Sociology, UC San Diego

Perig Pitrou, Maison Française d’Oxford and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale

Amrina Rosyada, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University

Roundtable Response by the Author

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London

Emma Kowal

Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia

Duke University Press, 2023

264 pages, 27 illustrations, appendices, notes, references, index

This book is like a magnificent conversation with a friend. Kowal has an eye for the uncanny, ghostly, and hauntingly ephemeral, which she leverages to address ethical and philosophical questions. She brings readers along as she tracks a hair sample collected in a chance encounter at a remote Australian railway station in 1923, which, 88 years later, appeared on the cover of Science. She turns to look at what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner called “the great Australian silence” about the country’s settler colonial history (20). And she explains the circumstances under which she was allowed to photograph a white painted plastic statue of an early twentieth century scientist—only after it was retrieved from a curatorial sanctum inaccessible to women.

Robert P. Jones

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future

Simon and Schuster, 2023

387 pages, notes, bibliography, index, and appendix (“Recommended reading related to the Doctrine of Discovery”)

In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published the first pieces of “The 1619 Project,” a collaborative work of long-form journalism in which Nikole Hannah-Jones and others argued that structural, or systemic, racism—a social arrangement built upon the subordination of people of color by Whites—was a foundational part of American history starting from the arrival in Jamestown of the first enslaved Africans in 1619. More recently, an important new work by Robert P. Jones pushes the genesis of systemic racism back much further, to 1493, the year that, in response to news of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Pope Alexander XI issued a series of Papal bulls that came to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. That doctrine declared that “European civilization and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions” (Jones 2023, 13) and therefore that it was not only proper, but also desirable, for some people to occupy and exploit lands belonging to others, so long as the occupiers were White Christians and those they occupied were non-Christian people of color. 

Don Watson

The Passion of Private White

Scribner, 2022

336 pages, 24 plates

I found reading this book both a humbling and a deeply moving experience. It is first and foremost a biography of the Australian anthropologist Neville White, but it is also an ethnography of two very different communities—the Yolngu people who live in the region of Donydji in Central Arnhem Land and a group, a “tribe,” of Vietnam veterans. The genius of the book is that it centers on the personal ethnography of Neville as the fulcrum between the two worlds—the Vietnam vets and the people of Donydji, conveying both his perspective and his passion. Don Watson was given access to Neville’s notebooks and accompanied him into the field with the vets. I have known Neville for many years, and I have worked with the Yolngu people for nearly as many years as he has. Watson’s account rings true to my experience. Of the Vietnam War and its effect on the young Australians who took part I know very little; it is not an experience that I share with Neville. In 1967 when he was on patrol as an Australian conscript in Vietnam, I was an undergraduate student marching through the streets of Central London, shouting with the crowd ‘Hey Hey LBJ – how many kids did you kill today’.

Editor’s note: This newest addition to HAR Reviews pairs a review essay with a brief author Q&A. Our reviewer, Karen Field, drafted the essay first and then brought some questions to the author. We thank Karen for suggesting this format and Patrick Schmidt for his participation, and we welcome more experiments with HoA writing and conversation.

Patrick L. Schmidt

Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations

Rowman and Littlefield, 2022

264 pages, notes, bibliography, index

Maya Angelou once said, “you can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” If she was right, then everyone with a stake in the social sciences today should read and reflect upon Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, a new work by Patrick L. Schmidt that traces the rise and fall of Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations, a department whose founders strove to unite sociology, anthropology, and psychology into a single discipline dedicated to the understanding of human behavior. 

Maria Beatrice Di Brizio

Histoire du concept de couvade: Edward B. Tylor et l’ethnologie victorienne

Histoire des sciences humaines (series)

L’Harmattan, 2021

636 pages

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this essay was published in French in the European Journal of Social Sciences (see Rosa, 2022). This translation is the author’s own.

In his classic study on Victorian Anthropology (1987), George W. Stocking, Jr. used the expression “a precipice in time,” referring to the nineteenth-century archaeological discovery of the antiquity of humankind to the detriment of biblical chronology. Mutatis mutandis, Maria Beatrice Di Brizio plunges the founding ancestor of anthropology, Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917), into a surprising precipice in time. The result of in-depth investigations conducted for over twenty years, her massive monograph, Histoire du concept de couvade, digs deep into the past in search of the antecedents to Tylor’s inaugural volume, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865). Beyond the exploration of Victorian anthropology, Di Brizio’s intellectual archaeology exhumes a vast literature from the eighteenth, seventeenth, and sixteenth centuries—with some sources dating back to the Middle Ages and Greco-Roman antiquity. Less known and less studied than his magnum opus Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor’s earlier volume is now brought to life as a fundamental text in the history of anthropology, or, more generally, in the history of the social sciences and the humanities.

Jerome Carroll
Anthropology’s Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
Lexington Books, 2018
256 pp., references, index

Anthropology and philosophy are today well-established disciplines in the modern academy. Philosophy is centuries older than anthropology in the academic sense, but philosophers have had an interest in anthropological knowledge for just as long, however rudimentary or limited.  Philosophy before the French Enlightenment may not be easily characterized as anthropological, but anthropology, by the end of the Victorian period, had established its academic identity as distinct from philosophy. This separation between anthropology and philosophy, however, was not quite characteristic of the intervening period in the German tradition, as Carroll demonstrates in Anthropology’s Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (2018). Carroll’s project highlights the relationship between anthropology and philosophy in this period and offers anintellectual history of the result—namely, an attempt at holist philosophical anthropology.

Thomas C. Patterson. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2021. 240 pp., bibl., index.

Twenty years after its first release, Thomas Patterson, a UC Riverside anthropologist, brings us the second edition of his book on the history of US anthropology. The material from the first edition has been revised and updated, and the new edition contains an additional chapter which deals with the most recent developments in US anthropology.

The book narrates a history of US anthropology in six chapters. It begins in the early modern period and ends in the year 2019. This temporal frame suggests that Patterson does not view anthropology as a discipline that began with its professionalization in the twentieth century. Instead, he takes anthropology to encompass a broader set of intellectual practices that have sought to understand otherness. This allows Patterson to discuss the ideas of Franz Boas, Eric Wolf, and Eleanor Leacock on a par with those of Enlightenment philosophers, early modern naturalists, and the Founding Fathers—meaning his history of US anthropology includes anthropological ideas circulating in North America well before the United States came into being.

Durba Mitra. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 302 pp., 15 b/w illus., notes, bibl., index.

Durba Mitra’s rich and compelling first book, Indian Sex Life, addresses how colonial and nationalist officials, scientists, and social scientists developed theories about Indian civilization, history, and progress through deployments of what Mitra terms “deviant female sexuality.” Mitra unpacks the ubiquity of this multi-layered and flexible concept across a variety of archives and disciplines, and further maps the circulation of social scientific thought in policy, law, and popular culture as a tool of entrenching colonial and native patriarchal authority. Focused primarily on upper-caste Bengali intellectuals and their global networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book argues that the trafficking of the “prostitute” in the transnational networks of colonial India was, above all else, a proliferating economy of discourses (p. 14). In doing so, Mitra unseats historical projects which seek to recuperate subaltern sexualities, instead emphasizing that the methods and categories used in such projects derive from an epistemological schema of racist and casteist expertise. 

Emmanuelle Loyer. Lévi-Strauss: A Biography. Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York: Polity Press, 2018. xi+744 pp., illus., notes, list of works, archives, index.

There is no shortage of books on Claude Lévi-Strauss. The defining force in French anthropology after World War II, an internationally-known intellectual, and a—many would argue the—founder of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss left an indelible mark on the intellectual culture of the twentieth century. Despite widespread interest in him, there have been relatively few biographies, perhaps because of the challenges he presents as a subject: his sojourns in the United States, Brazil, and France require potential biographers to be multilingual. His output was vast, demanding, and difficult to synthesize. His extraordinary fame makes documenting his influence a massive undertaking. Even his private life presents a challenge: Lévi-Strauss lived much of his life in his study, making most of his biography too uneventful to make for interesting reading. Happily, however, Emanuelle Loyer’s 744 page biography has achieved the seemingly impossible. This detailed, deeply researched, and relatively accessible volume makes it difficult to imagine that anyone will attempt a more exhaustive biography in the future. If they did, I am not sure what they could add to Loyer’s account. While many aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s life still await specialized treatment, I am confident that this book will become the definitive one-volume biography of Lévi-Strauss for the foreseeable future.

Jie Gao. Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China. Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019. 364 pp., 20 b/w photos, appendices, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.

Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the “Father of the Republic,” often lamented that the Chinese people were “a sheet of loose sand,” for their supposed failure to cohere as a nation. Indeed, between the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949), many intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries in China were vexed by the apparent problem identified by Sun: how to build a modern nation-state on the rubble of traditional dynastic empires, with a people not used to the idea of national belonging? One group that manifested very high levels of enthusiasm for this nation-building project were early-twentieth century academics, who believed that introducing Western fields of study (often filtered through Japan) could serve as an antidote to what they saw as a stifling traditional Confucian education with its emphasis on hierarchies and virtue rather than fraternité and power. Happily, for the twenty-first century researcher, these intellectuals wrote a lot. In Saving the Nation through Culture, Jie Gao plumbs the extensive library of one sub-group of these intellectuals, the folklorists. As Gao puts it, the folklore movement emerged in China “as a means of providing evidence of unity and a rich, vibrant popular culture that would, they believed, rally the people around the flag in a time of great national difficulty” (3).

Tobias Rees. After Ethnos. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018. 192 pp., 3 illus., notes, bibl., index.

In “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” Clifford Geertz wrote that to understand a discipline you should look at what its practitioners do, rather than accepting what they say they do. And anthropologists, he claimed, do ethnography: they write. “The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse; he writes it down,” Geertz argued. Ethnographers thus turn passing events into accounts.^[1] Since the years of Malinowski, this method-driven definition of the discipline—at least in its “cultural” branch—implied the existence of more or less static “societies,” “cultures,” a well-defined ethnos constructed as an object to be studied and described with a long-term fieldwork approach. The answer thus emerged before the question: cultural anthropologists knew that human lifeworlds took place in societies or cultures, and their science should describe them. But as the world changed—decolonization, the emergence of new states and what Geertz later called “complicated places,”^[2] the end of the Cold War, deeper globalization (from above and from below)—it became harder to disentangle the ethnographic project from the practice of delimiting, defining, or better yet, inventing “peoples,” “societies,” and “cultures” in order to write them down.

Robert L. Carneiro. Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History. 339 pp., 10 b/w illus., bibl., index. Boulder: Westview Press, 2003. (Reprinted by Routledge in 2018)

Efram Sera-Shriar (Editor). Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences (with an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek). 320 pp., 13 b/w illus., notes, bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.

At first sight, these two books do not have much in common. Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology is a single-author monograph by one of the “last” great neo-evolutionist anthropologists of the twentieth century, Robert L. Carneiro, who died in June 2020, aged 93; Historicizing Humans is a collective volume by a new generation of historians of science. One is profoundly presentist; the other is profoundly historicist. One is mainly dedicated to anthropology and archaeology in the twentieth century, with shorter chapters on the “classical” evolutionists; the other (as indicated in the title) is focused on the nineteenth century only, and across various disciplines. Carneiro dialogs with dead scholars as inspirational intellectual interlocutors while Sera-Shriar and the contributors to his edited volume do not. One book aims at covering transversal themes, concepts, and methods in North America and Britain (with but a few references to German scholars) while the other deploys eight selected case studies in Britain and the Empire. Other disparities between the two volumes could certainly be enumerated.

Erika Lorraine Milam. Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America. 408 pp., 33 b/w illus., app., notes, index. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

“Human nature” is nearly as pliable and ambiguous a term as “Cold War” but Erika Lorraine Milam pins down these slippery concepts in Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America. Milam successfully crafts an important analysis of the science of human nature that crystallized around questions of aggression in post-war America. Milam’s “Cold War” is less of an international geopolitical event than it is a setting in which US governmental concerns about American society intersected with and funded the work of anthropological experts studying the origins of human behavior. Against this backdrop, Milam sets out to discover how questions of human behavior became important and how the science of evolution gained popular explanatory power to answer them. In Creatures of Cain, Milam examines American social science after World War II and its attempts to make sense of humanity’s species-level relationship with violence. This book spans the late 1950s and the emergence of the “killer ape” hypothesis and ends in the 1980s with the rise of sociobiological explanations for violence.

Editor’s note: The following essay is a response to “Memoirs of Women and Harvard” by Alice B. Kehoe, published on 9 August 2021 in Reviews. You can find the original essay here.

Alice Kehoe, in her review article, “Memoirs of Women and Harvard,” makes the following inaccurate assertion, “Cora Du Bois was there [Harvard’s Department of Anthropology] only because wealthy patron Doris Zemurray Stone recommended her for the chair the Zemurray family endowed specifically for a woman.” This was in the context of discussing Victoria R. Bricker’s book, Transformational Journeys: An Ethnologist’s Memoir (2017), in which Bricker mentions some of her experiences as a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard and references Du Bois’s mentoring of her.

Victoria R. Bricker. Transformational Journeys: An Ethnologist’s Memoir. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 106, part 5. 344 pp., illus. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2017.

Becky Cooper. We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence. 512 pp., notes. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020.

That Harvard’s Department of Anthropology did not favor women is well-known. So well-known that some of it is pure myth. Contrary to a common story, women were not required to sit outside classrooms listening through the door. David Browman, who researched and wrote most of Anthropology at Harvard,^[1] discovered that up until about 1925, professors could, if they wished, offer separate meetings of their classes, one for men and one for women. Harvard had a School for the Collegiate Instruction of Women that in 1893 became Radcliffe College, with its own campus and classrooms. During the 1920s, women began sitting in classrooms with men.^[2] Women who earned an Anthropology PhD at Harvard received a Radcliffe diploma until 1963. Mine, in Spring 1964, may have been the first Harvard diploma in Anthropology issued to a woman.

Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye. Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. 304 (hardcover) or 360 (paperback) pp., 71 b&w illus., ref., index. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Curatorial Conversations explores the legacy of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) by bringing together scholars with decades of experience as curators, researchers, and participants. This collection of essays is not so much a history of the festival as it is an attempt to trace the evolution of what it means to be a SFF curator and a reflection upon how relationships with cultural communities—whether Cajun fiddlers, Tibetan expatriates, or NASA engineers—have been refined and strengthened since the festival’s 1967 debut. My intention here is to provide a brief overview of the anthology and highlight three themes I found particularly salient, before concluding with some questions concerning the future of the festival.