Despite the rapid development of the historiography of anthropology, the image of “pre-posts” American anthropology is as servants of colonialism who “extracted” information from indigenous peoples and published works causing them harm. The critique of the field that grew first from the crises of the 1960s (the war in Vietnam, civil rights movement, the end of colonialism) has grown through the decades with so many forms of critique that the actual historic record has been lost and been replaced by mythology. There are few theory or history courses today that correct these myths, at best devoting a few sessions to “Boas, Benedict, Mead.” This talk will draw on some chapters of my recent book, Correcting the Record: Essays on the History of American Anthropology (2025) stressing American anthropology’s role (in the United States) as the scholarly discipline that rejected ideas of racial determinism and the inferiority of “primitive peoples” that had been established in both the public mind and previous “science.” It was the field that insisted on the value of ways of life that were very different, and produced irreplaceable ethnographic studies for both the descendants of the people studied and humanity at large.
Program
17:00: Welcome by HOAN convenors, Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Katja Geisenhainer, Udo Mischek and Marko Pišev
17:05: Keynote speaker: Herbert S. Lewis, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Title: A New Look at the History of American Anthropology
17:30: Open forum for questions and comments
17:45: A new History of Anthropology stakeholder: IUAES – CHOA. Presentation by Celso Castro (Chair) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Deputy Chair)
17:55: Open forum for questions and comments
18:00: Presentation of HOAN flagged panels at EASA 2026 – Poznań by HOAN Conveners
18: 15: Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors