History of Anthro Thought

This is the homepage for a 2024 anthropology course titled “The History of Anthropological Thought.” As a textbook, we read through Anthropological Theory for the Twenty-First Century: A Critical Approach edited by A. Lynn Bolles, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Bernard C. Perley, and Keri Vacanti Brondo.

Part 1

Before Anthropology

Apess exposed colonial hypocrisy, Douglass proved humanity shouldn’t need proving, Marx recruited for revolution—all before anthropology existed as a discipline.

William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833)
Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” (1854)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Bourgeois and Proletarians” (1872)

Theorizing Difference

Morgan’s evolutionary stages, Parsons’ radical labor politics, Weber’s Protestant ethic—late 19th century frameworks for understanding human difference.

Lewis Henry Morgan, “Ethnical Periods” (1877)
Lucy Parsons, Speeches at the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (1905)
Max Weber, Excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

Inventing Fieldwork

Boas, Mead, Parker, and Hurston said “let’s actually go find out”—a revolutionary challenge to scientific racism. Hurston did more fieldwork than most but died broke and forgotten.

Edward Sapir, “Language and Environment” (1912)
Arthur Caswell Parker, “The Origin of the Iroquois as Suggested by their Archaeology” (1916)
Franz Boas, “Methods of Ethnology” (1920)
Margaret Mead, “The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology” (1926)
Zora Neale Hurston, Excerpt from Mules and Men (1935)

The Culture Concept

Malinowski’s kula ring, Mauss’s gift, Benedict’s patterns—culture became anthropology’s signature concept, for better and worse.

Bronisław Malinowski, “The Essentials of the Kula” (1922)
Marcel Mauss, Excerpt from The Gift (1925)
Ruth Benedict, “The Science of Custom” (1935)

Revolutionary Roots

Early anthropologists were actual revolutionaries on the fringes—immigrants, Jews, women. Kenyatta became president of Kenya but got erased from the canon. Tracy Chapman majored in anthropology.

Jomo Kenyatta, Excerpt from Facing Mt. Kenya (1938)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws” (1951)

History, Inequality, Power

Wolf, Du Bois, and Ortiz challenged how “culture” erased history, interconnection, and power—be HIP.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The White Worker” (1935)
Fernando Ortiz, “On the Social Phenomenon of ‘Transculturation’ and Its Importance in Cuba” (1940)
Eric Wolf, “The World in 1400” (1982)

Reproducing Inequality

Stoler corrected the Marx bros’ blind spot on gender and sexuality; Farmer showed how structural violence reproduces inequality across generations.

Ann L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures” (1989)
Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” (2004)

Writing Against Culture

From Geertz’s cockfight to Abu-Lughod’s critique, Anthropology 3.0 synthesizes political economy with positioned knowledge.

Katherine Dunham, “Twenty-Seventh Day” (1946)
Clifford Geertz, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973)
Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunters Rage” (1989)
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture” (1991)
Rosabelle Boswell, “Sensuous Stories in the Indian Ocean Islands” (2017)

Native Anthropologist

Medicine shows what it means to be both anthropologist AND Native; Krotz reveals the silencing of anthropologies from the South.

Beatrice Medicine, “Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining ‘Native'” (1978)
Edward W. Said, “Knowing the Oriental” (1979)
Esteban Krotz, “Anthropologies of the South: Their Rise, Their Silencing, Their Characteristics” (1997)

The Savage Slot

Trouillot exposes anthropology’s constitutive niche—needing “savages” to exist; Hau’ofa reimagines the Pacific as “our sea of islands.”

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness” (1991)
Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands” (2008)

Gender and Kinship

From Leacock’s Engels critique to Anzaldúa’s borderlands—gender, kinship, and sexuality were never the separate domains we imagined.

Eleanor Burke Leacock, “Introduction to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1972)
Sylvia Junko Yanagisako & Jane Fishburne Collier, “Toward a Unified Analysis of Gender and Kinship” (1987)
Ifi Amadiume, Excerpt from Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987)
Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a new consciousness” (1987)
Philippe Bourgois, “In Search of Masculinity: Violence, Respect and Sexuality among Puerto Rican Crack Dealers in East Harlem” (1996)

Part 2

Queering Anthropology

Foucault rewrote the history of sexuality; Towle and Morgan challenge the romantic use of “third gender” concepts.

Michel Foucault, Excerpt from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1976)
Evan B. Towle & Lynn M. Morgan, “Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept” (2002)

Homonormativity

Why was Compton’s Cafeteria 1966 erased in favor of Stonewall 1969? Stryker, Allen, and Shange reveal how liberation movements reproduce exclusions.

Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity” (2008)
Jafari Allen, “One Way or Another: Erotic Subjectivity in Cuba” (2012)
Savannah Shange, “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship” (2019)

Situated Knowledges

Haraway’s “privilege of partial perspective” meets Jones’s native anthropology reflection and Davis’s politically engaged practice.

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988)
Delmos Jones, “Anthropology and the Oppressed: A Reflection on ‘Native’ Anthropology” (1995)
Dana-Ain Davis, “What Did You Do Today? Notes From a Politically Engaged Anthropologist” (2003)

Ethnographic Authority

Who has authority to represent? Citizen anthropologists in Southern Africa and Perley’s “gone anthropologist” dilemmas.

Heike Becker, Emile Boonzaier, & Joy Owen, “Fieldwork in Shared Spaces: Positionality, Power and Ethics of Citizen Anthropologists in Southern Africa” (2005)
Bernard Perley, “‘Gone Anthropologist’: Epistemic Slippage, Native Anthropology, and the Dilemmas of Representation” (2013)

Beyond Culture?

Do we need new theory or just new vocabulary? Wolf already said what Gupta and Ferguson said in 1992. When theory becomes incomprehensible, who benefits?

Arjun Appadurai, “Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery” (1986)
Akhil Gupta & James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference” (1992)
Aihwa Ong, “Mutations in Citizenship” (2006)

Global Apartheid

Harrison extends apartheid analysis beyond South Africa to global structures of racial capitalism.

Faye Harrison, “Global Apartheid at Home and Abroad” (2008)

Indigenizing the Anthropocene

“Yay capitalism” and “oh no Anthropocene” share the same problem—both reduce people to economic maximizers; Todd offers relationality as alternative.

Paige West, “Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology” (2005)
Zöe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene” (2015)
Arturo Escobar, Excerpt from Designs for a Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds (2018)
Alaka Wali, “Complicity and Resistance in the Indigenous Amazon: Economía Indígena Under Siege” (2020)

Symbolic Power

Bourdieu on how power works symbolically; Aretxaga and Verdery on how states actually operate—through gender, nationalism, and bureaucratic obstruction.

Pierre Bourdieu, “Symbolic Power” (1977)
Begoña Aretxaga, “What the Border Hides: Partition and Gender Politics of Irish Nationalism” (1998)
Katherine Verdery, “Seeing like a mayor. Or, how local officials obstructed Romanian land restitution” (2002)

Necropolitics

Mbembe’s opener deserves an A: “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power to dictate who may live and who must die.”

Achille Mbembé, “Necropolitics” (2003)
Christen Smith, “Strange Fruit: Brazil, Necropolitics, and the Transnational Resonance of Torture and Death” (2013)

Agency Is Not Resistance

Mahmood argues we must delink agency from progressive politics—agential capacity includes the multiple ways one inhabits norms.

Saba Mahmood, “The Subject of Freedom” (2005)
Shalini Shankar, “Speaking like a Model Minority: ‘FOB’ Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley” (2008)
Victoria Redclift, “Abjects or Agents? Camps, Contests, and the Creation of ‘Political Space.'” (2013)

Anthropology of Refusal

Simpson asks: Do you consent to the lawful theft of your land? North America is not postcolonial—they never left. Bonilla and Rosa connect Ferguson to global protest.

Yarimar Bonilla & Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States” (2015)
Audra Simpson, “Consent’s Revenge” (2016)

Antiracist Anthropology

Bolles forges Black feminist tradition; Mullings interrogates racism; Hage asks what ethical encounter with theory even means.

Lynn Bolles, “Seeking the Ancestors: Forging a Black Feminist Tradition in Anthropology” (2001)
Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology” (2005)
Ghassan Hage, “Towards an Ethics of the Theoretical Encounter” (2016)

Caretaking Relations

TallBear offers caretaking relations as alternative to American dreaming; Maskovsky asks what anthropology looks like at home in the end times.

Jeff Maskovsky, “At Home in the End Times”
Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming” (2019)

Anthropological Theory Playlists

For 2024:
In my 2023 course titled “Anthropology on ‘A New History of Humanity,'” I used The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Here is the YouTube Playlist for that course:
In 2022, I used four books for the Anthropological Theory course, with Tim Ingold’s Perception of the Environment as the backbone. Here is the playlist for that course: