Editors' Introduction

This fifth volume of Histories of Anthropology Annual (HOAA) marks a turning point in our relationship with the University of Nebraska Press. Initially we contracted for an annual volume outside the journals division with the understanding that when the annual volume had established its credibility and sustainability the Press would consider making it an official journal. We thank Manjit Kaur and Matt Bokovoy for their help in making this transition a smooth one.

Histories of Anthropology Annual will continue to be available in individual copies, but we encourage our readers to subscribe on an ongoing basis. We need your support also to encourage library subscriptions (volumes 1–4 remain available). The journal now is available on Project Muse, which will facilitate our exposure to a larger readership. In short, we are delighted that this project has reached a stage of maturity both as a publication and in the scope and breadth of its content and thank all those who have participated—as contributors, advisors, reviewers, and readers.

As editors, we cannot help but muse about the changes over more than a decade of collaboration intended to enhance the visibility of history of anthropology within the discipline. We have noted the 2002 centennial of the American Anthropological Association, over five years in the planning, as a turning point in general perception of the importance of this area to the general discipline. The AAA has taken a strong supporting position, with two special issues of the American Anthropologist devoted to history of anthropology, publication of centennial-related projects, establishment of an interest group within the General Anthropology Division, and renaming of the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology in acknowledgment of the historical roots of the Americanist tradition. The annual meeting of the AAA regularly features a good number of sessions and individual papers pertaining to disciplinary histories, with younger scholars well represented, and there is growing presence as well in the Society for American Archaeology and in organizations beyond the United States.

HOAA has established a niche for itself in presenting unrelated papers by a range of authors from diverse national traditions, traditional subdisciplines, and transnational locations. The publication outlets that existed when volume 1 appeared in 2005 have continued to develop in synergy: the Wisconsin thematic series now edited by Richard Handler, the Nebraska Critical Studies in History of Anthropology series edited by Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray, and the newsletter edited by Henrika Kuklick. Andrew and Harriet Lyons and Susan Trencher have spearheaded the GAD interest group. We consider it a real strength that different people have taken leadership in different parts of this evolution of the subfield of history of anthropology.

As is true of previous volumes, we as editors are startled at the crisscrossing configurations encompassed within these pages. There are biographical interests, always framed within larger contexts of ongoing anthropological emergence. Georges Devereux and Ruth Benedict are discussed in contexts suggesting that re-evaluation of the Americanist culture-and-personality tradition may be forthcoming from multiple quarters; culture and personality also forms one of the threads in the story of mothering from an anthropological standpoint. Alfred Kroeber's cultural configurations are reframed in the contemporary discourse of complexity theory. The Australian ventures of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Paul Kirchoff, in quite different ways, illustrate the engagement of Anglo American anthropology across continents. Like many other Boasians, Alexander Goldenweiser lived in a cultural and ethnographic world not confined to North America. Tendrils across traditions. Charlotte Gower Chapman has been treated primarily within Americanist contexts, but emerges here in terms of her role in Milocca. Institutional development remains another constant of historicist scholarship: the De Mortillet Collection tells us much about how anthropological knowledge comes to be in the public domain; new archival revelations about Lewis Henry Morgan clarify his relationships to the Tonawanda Seneca; AAA annual meetings reflect gradual shifts in disciplinary priorities; and examination of undergraduate anthropology at a single institution expands our view of how personal influences and networks are established and maintained.

Many of these topics and approaches would not have been generally considered "history of anthropology...