Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology Book

History-making can be used both to bolster and to contest the legitimacy of established canons. Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions seeks to widen the anthropological past and, in doing so, to invigorate contemporary anthropological practice. In the past decade, anthropologists have become increasingly aware of the ways in which participation in professional anthropology has depended and continues to depend on categorical boundaries of race, class, gender, citizenship, institutional and disciplinary affiliation, and English-language proficiency. Historians of anthropology play a crucial role both in setting and questioning those boundaries; as they do, they make newly available the work of anthropologists who have been ignored. Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions focuses on little-known scholars who contributed to the anthropological work of their time, such as John William Jackson, the members of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, Charlotte Gower Chapman, and Lucie Varga. In addition, essays on Marius Barbeau and Sol Tax present figures who were centrally located in the anthropologies of their day but who are not currently well remembered. A final essay analyzes notions of "the canon" and considers the place of a classic ethnographic area, highland New Guinea, in anthropological canon-formation. The essays in Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions illustrate different processes of inclusion and exclusion in the history of anthropology. Taken together, they suggest a larger project of historical recuperation that contemporary anthropologists find increasingly relevant to both their theoretical and their political concerns. Contributors include Peter Pels, Lee Baker, Frances Slaney, Maria Lepowsky, George Stocking, Ronald Stade, and Douglas Dalton.Read More