On May 11, 2011, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium opened the exhibition "Congo Far West: Artists in Residencé. Sammy Baloji and Patrick Mudekereza." In this article, Couttenier focuses ...mainly on his collaboration with photographer and video artist Sammy Baloji, who was fascinated, for the purpose of this residency, by Congolese masks, physical anthropology, and colonial art work and photography. He worked on photographs by François Michel and sketches, drawings, and paintings by Léon Dardenne, who were both responsible for creating a visual record of the Charles Lemaire expedition. This scientific expedition was carried out at the request of the Congo Free State. As a "portraitist of present humans," Baloji employed a brand-new technique by creating diptychs of Michel's and his own new photographs, allowing him to provide a prominent place for Copngolese expertise.
Drawing on Thomas Kuhn's concept of "disciplinary matrix" and Max Weber's discussion of charisma, I discuss anthropologist Franz Boas and folklorist Alan Dundes as charismatic disciplinary leaders. ...From archival research for Boas and interviews for Dundes, I draw out the components of what Elsie Clews Parsons called "the professional family," and, through the words of Boas's and Dundes's students, I add life to these two portraits.
The author deals with a chapter from the histories of Croatian and Slovenian ethnology, particularly the period of the 1950s, when both national ethnological disciplines were engaged with the issue ...of the relationship between general and regional/national ethnology. As far as concerns this relationship, Branimir Bratanić and Vilko Novak, both university professors at that time, followed the contemporary line of discussions in European ethnology (EE). They presented the "novelties" and advocated the integration of specific national traditions in EE, adapting them by respecting disciplinary legacies and current state of the discipline in their home countries as well as their educational agendas and broader research practices. For this reason, this study also includes a comparative presentation of some disciplinary convergences and divergences right before this particular period: the links between Croatian and Slovenian ethnology that come to light when emphasising the conceptualization of the research field, institutional history, and contacts among researchers.
The development of anthropology in France and North America during the early to mid 20th century showed both similarities and pronounced differences. In both cases anthropology matured alongside ...sociology, a relationship that would prove increasingly problematic as the century wore on. In France, in particular, another important influence was art and literature, especially the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s. This was less the case in North America, but in both countries, anthropology occupied a medial position between science and the humanities.
This article reviews the broadening scope of anthropological studies of law between 1949 and 1999, and considers how the political background of the period may be reflected in anglophone academic ...perspectives. At the mid-century, the legal ideas and practices of non-Western peoples, especially their modes of dispute management, were studied in the context of colonial rule. Two major schools of thought emerged and endured. One regarded cultural concepts as central in the interpretation of law. The other was more concerned with the political and economic milieu, and with self-serving activity. Studies of law in non-Western communities continued, but from the 1960s and 1970s a new stream turned to issues of class and domination in Western legal institutions. An analytic advance occurred when attention turned to the fact that the state was not the only source of obligatory norms, but coexisted with many other sites where norms were generated and social control exerted. This heterogeneous phenomenon came to be called `legal pluralism'. The work of the half-century has culminated in broadly conceived, politically engaged studies that address human rights, the requisites of democracy, and the obstacles to its realization.
This paper explores a broad range of ways in which anthropological research was linked to military and intelligence agencies during the Cold War, and it examines evidence and implications of the 1976 ...findings by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (chaired by Senator Frank Church) that during the 1950s and 1960s "massive" amounts of international research were covertly funded by the CIA. The reasons anthropologists did not more critically consider why or how their work aligned with the interests of the CIA and Pentagon are considered, and the implications of post—World War II disciplinary decisions to ignore political dimensions of research in favor of ethical considerations are discussed.
This article reflects upon the methodological challenges posed by the study of secretive organizations and programmes. In particular, it examines the question: when participant‐observation is not a ...feasible option, what techniques can anthropologists use to shed light upon covert military and intelligence agencies and the corporations that they contract? After reviewing anthropological research on secret societies from the late 18th and early 19th century, the author turns to contemporary anthropological work on bureaucratic institutions and initiatives that operate in secret. The author's own research into the US Army's Human Terrain System serves as an illustration. By adapting Laura Nader's suggestions for ‘studying up, down, and sideways’, the article suggests that documentary analysis (of both openly accessible and classified documents), interviews, and ‘self‐analysis’ provide a fruitful combination of methods for an anthropology of the covert.
This essay is devoted to exploring the nature, roles, and relationships of the anthropological discipline and its professions over time and their implications for matters of policy and practice in ...American society. The interdependence of discipline and profession in the emergence of anthropology is considered first, setting the stage for reflecting upon several matters: (1) lessons drawn from the history of British colonialism and other engagements; (2) the difference between problems of others and problems for others; and (3) a contemporary case involving disciplinary-professional-boundary tensions. This discussion raises the question of whether anthropology is approaching the issue of engagement with contemporary problem contexts as innovatively and creatively as we might, considering all that we know of our history and the challenges facing us today.
This paper analyses a speech delivered by Francis James Gillen during the opening stages of what is now regarded as one of the most significant ethnographic recording events in Australian history. ...Gillen's 'speech' at the 1896 Engwura festival provides a unique insight into the complex personal relationships that early anthropologists had with Aboriginal people. This recently unearthed text, recorded by Walter Baldwin Spencer in his field notebook, demonstrates how Gillen and Spencer sought to establish the parameters of their anthropological enquiry in ways that involved both Arrernte agency and kinship while at the same time invoking the hierarchies of colonial anthropology in Australia. By examining the content of the speech, as it was written down by Spencer, we are also able to reassesses the importance of Gillen to the ethnographic ambitions of the Spencer/Gillen collaboration. The incorporation of fundamental Arrernte concepts and the use of Arrernte words to convey the purpose of their 1896 fieldwork suggest a degree of Arrernte involvement and consent not revealed before. The paper concludes with a discussion of the outcomes of the Engwura festival and the subsequent publication of The Native Tribes of Central Australia within the context of a broader set of relationships that helped to define the emergent field of Australian anthropology at the close of the nineteenth century.
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