Editors' Introduction

Histories of Anthropology Annual (HOAA) is dedicated to the proposition that there is diversity in the history of anthropology as a disciplinary specialization, just as there is diversity in the anthropologies we practice. We believe that considerable work is being done that is not reaching its appropriate audiences. HOAA will assemble such diverse efforts and make them more visible and accessible.

Publication outlets for anthropological historians directing their work to an audience of anthropologists have been limited to date. The History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN), established by George W. Stocking Jr. in 1973 and currently edited by Henrika Kuklick, has kept scholars in contact but has failed to provide them with a larger disciplinary audience. The University of Wisconsin monograph series History of Anthropology, also founded by Stocking and now edited by Richard Handler, has provided thematic volumes with potential course-text value as well as systematic documentation of some pieces of our history, but the structure of the series has necessarily restricted content to certain themes. The Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology series, edited by Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray for the University of Nebraska Press, has facilitated the publication of books, including biographies, documenting the history of anthropology, largely in North America. Although research in our disciplinary history has been published in disparate journals such as Critique of Anthropology and Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, scholars would need to search widely to find all that has been published. Even worse, much research has languished unpublished, known only to a few specialists. HOAA is intended as a place for this invisible body of work.

The editors do have a few axes to grind about what the history of anthropology is and should be. Key among these is a set of themes that can be shorthanded as diversity: diversity of practitioners; diversity of national, theoretical, and methodological traditions; diversity of subdisciplines and ways to merge and cross them. Anthropologies have developed from different starting points and with different trajectories in various parts of the world, and these various traditions have interacted through most of the discipline's history. "Central place" models of the discipline (whether the "center" is the United States, New York/Philadelphia/Washington, Columbia/Berkeley/Chicago, or whatever) may have some utility at certain times and for certain questions, but they fail to fully document the ways anthropologies have developed. They also shortchange what some might consequently construct as "lesser" traditions, those on the peripheries howsoever defined, and thus contribute to reproducing sociopolitical hierarchies of knowledge that we believe are better challenged than reinforced.

Anthropologists have been rich and poor, urban and rural, of various national, ethnoracial, and religious backgrounds, and these individuals with their different personal histories and personalities have shaped and colored the discipline. Although American anthropologists today typically refer to anthropology as a "four field" discipline—comprising archaeology, linguistics, sociocultural anthropology, and biological anthropology—this subdisciplinary division is by no means universal even within the American traditions, let alone in the broader world. And individual practitioners have always crossed such "boundaries" with alacrity, demonstrating the arbitrariness of the construct.

Theoretical and methodological camps are perhaps the most recognized diversity and certainly have produced some of the most hostile debates. Students seem to want to fall into one camp or another even without the active inculcation that they often receive as part of their training, and the all-too-typical pattern of teaching disciplinary history as a chronological progression of theories—a sort of simplistic evolutionary framework that few would countenance in any other aspect of their work—does little to defeat that impulse. The editors are adamant that these models are a poor way to understand our histories, that theoretical and methodological camps have always coexisted and cross-fertilized, and that individuals who may seem easily categorized as "functionalist" or "poststructuralist" or what have you are and were much more complex in their lives and work than such labeling allows.

Instead of some sort of evolutionary framework of ideas, we see complex and shifting social and ideological webs. There are several important consequences of this position. It encourages...