Anthropology’s Ancestors: A review essay on a new Berghahn collection

Abstract

Anthropological history is today a growth area. This essay reviews the new collection Anthropology’s Ancestors that Aleksandar Boskovic is editing at Berghahn. The three short books he has published so far are very engaging intellectual histories of three anthropologists of the past who have recently received increased critical attention and whose legacy certainly deserves it: Robertson Smith, Margaret Mead and Françoise Héritier.

Ancestral cites: Citation politics and canonical figures in Protestant communities

“…Acknowledging this debt has spawned several interesting forms. One has been the biographical essay or book that profiles a single writer, with the aim of familiarizing them to a scholarly audience (see e.g., Guarasci, Moore, and Vaughn, 2018; Pina-Cabral, 2023). These efforts importantly undertake the intellectual labor involved in rethinking canonical traditions, sharing that knowledge for the betterment of the community as a whole.…”

Practices, themes and problems of anthropology in the present: global perspectives and critical contexts in the contemporary world - a mosaic

“…The mosaic of anthropological work refracted here also includes dialogues with fields of knowledge such as engineering and mathematics (Kelly, 2022), the interactions between sensory experiences in music and the use of audiovisual media (Villela, 2022), or the exploration of the urban, a privileged thematic area in Brazilian anthropology as elsewhere, here set in dialogue with sociology and especially geography (Espinosa, 2022). These reflections are complemented by others on science in general (Marini & Marras, 2022) and anthropology in particular, whose historical trajectories are explored by João de Pina-Cabral in a shrewd essay (Pina-Cabral, 2022) surveying a new collection of books and, especially, the diversity of the discipline's contemporary practices.…”