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HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY Whence/Whither At a time when bookshelves bulge with journals ever-more-costly and everless -often read, the launching of a new volume-series demands a brief selfexplaining introduction. What is the audience whose unserved needs we address ? What is the subject of our discourse? How do we intend to pursue it? And why do we begin with a particular aspect of it? Although there has been occasional interest in the history of anthropology throughout the century since the emergence of the modern academic discipline , a more systematic concern may be traced to the Conference on the History of Anthropology stimulated by A. 1. Hallowell and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in 1962 (cf. Hymes 1962). Two decades later, what was once for the most part the episodic effort of reminiscent elder anthropologists or roving intellectual historians has become something approximating a recognized research specialization. The History of Anthropology: A Research Bibliography includes 2,439 titles culled from over 5,000 collected by its editors (Kemper & Phinney 1977), and for the past decade each biannual issue of the History of Anthropology Newsletter has recorded a substantial number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and books by scholars who think of themselves as historians of anthropology (Stocking, ed. 1973-). The impetus for this development has come from both history and anthropology . Historians have no doubt been impelled in part by the inherent expansionism of a profession whose rapidly multiplying apprentices must find still unplowed fields for their research. But historical interest is also motivated by more general professional and social concerns centering on issues of knowledge and power. The long-run trend towards the professionalization of intellectual life within academic disciplines often lately pervaded by a sense of crisis has made these disciplines themselves seem historically problematic; issues of racial and ethnic relations in the decolonizing world have turned historians' attention to the ideology of race and culture (cf. Hinsley 1981). Although doubtless variously motivated, the heightened retrospective interest of anthropologists reflects the special sense of disciplinary crisis that 3 4 HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY has developed since about 1960. With the withdrawal of the umbrella of European power that long protected their entry into the colonial field, anthropologists found it increasingly difficult to gain access to (as well as ethically more problematic to study) the non-European "others" who had traditionally excited the anthropological imagination-and who seemed finally about to realize, through cultural change, the long-trumpeted anthropological prediction of the "vanishing primitive." Some envisioned "the end of anthropology" along with its traditional subject matter (cf. Worsley 1970). Some wondered whether anthropology was a reversible and universal form of knowledge or merely the way Europeans had explained to themselves the "others" encountered during the centuries-long period of European overseas expansion (Stocking 1982b:419). Still others proposed the "reinvention" of the discipline. Calling into question its institutionalization within the academy , turning for the first time in its history toward Marxist and feminist theory, they advocated a more "reflexive" study of social groups within EuroAmerican societies, and an active political involvement on behalf of its subjects (Hymes, ed. 1973). Whether it is being reinvented, or simply being carried along by institutional inertia, anthropology in the early 1980s continues to face profound issues of disciplinary identity (Hoebel, ed. 1982). The development of self-study by post-colonial "native anthropologists" raises new ethical and methodological problems; reflexive study in the metropolis contributes to the centrifugal proliferation of "adjectival anthropologies" without providing a unifying substantive focus; epistemological and ethical doubts have weakened methodological resolution without yet resolving the problematic character of fieldwork method; the questioning of old concepts and the legitimation of new theoretical alternatives has not established the basis for a new integrative orientation; and despite a growing concern with increasing non-academic employment options for its surplus doctorates, the discipline remains essentially an academic one. In this context, some anthropologists have become increasingly conscious of the historical character of their discipline. Not only are the problems and the data of anthropology once again seen to be essentially historical after a half-century of predominantly synchronic emphases, but anthropology itself is increasingly viewed as an historical phenomenon. In order to understand their present predicament and to find and/or to legitimate approaches that might lead them out of it, a number of anthropologists have turned to the history of anthropology (e.g., Auge 1979; Crick 1976; Harris 1968). The founding of History of Anthropology (hereafter, HOA) is an outcome of...

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