Prologue

The prologue issues a challenge to all interested in the Classics to address the questions ‘Why does Classics matter now?’ and ‘What should it hope to contribute to the vital issues of our present?’ by exploring how the Classics have always been embroiled in anthropological conversations about our place in relation to others. The aim of the book they frame, they assert, is to highlight—ultimately in positive terms—the contingency of the Classics’ most profound (and often disastrous) conceptual heritage to us. The historical story of the place of the Classical tradition and Classics in anthropology, it claims, enlivens us to the real contribution the Classics might make now beyond the history of Classical reception and enjoins direct engagement with the question of why we need Classics now. This book’s story of the history of anthropology, it argues, tells us this: we need to do it in order to think beyond it.

Book Reviews

Maria Czaplicka: Gender, Shamanism, Race: An Anthropological Biography Grażyna Kubica, translated by Ben Koschalka (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology Series, eds. Regna Darnell and Robert Oppenheim], xix + 591 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2261-9.Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History Edited by David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova (Cambridgeshire, UK: White Horse Press 2021,), 343 pp. ISBN: 978-1-912186-16-7.Mebet Alexander Grigorenko, translated by Christopher Culver (London: Glagoslav Publications, 2020), 174 pp. $23.65 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-912894-90-1.

Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism

If our knowledge of shamanism has been so abidingly partial, so impressively uneven, so deeply varied by history, and so enduringly skeptical for so long, how has its study come to occupy such pride of place in the anthropological canon? One answer comes in a history of social relations where shamans both are cast as translators of the unseen and are themselves sites of anxiety in a very real world, one of encounters across lines of gender, class, and colonial incursions often defined by race. This article contends that as anthropologists have cultivated a long and growing library of shamanic practice, many appear to have found, in a globally diverse range of spirit practitioners, translators across social worlds who are not unlike themselves, suggesting that in the shaman we find a remarkable history of anthropology.

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American anthropology: Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas’s early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far less known is their shared interest in probing the representational potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension of their work is manifest in Sapir’s critical writing on music and literature and Mead’s groundbreaking work with photography and film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers’ scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.

Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty

Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Virgin Birth Controversy. Study in the Anthropology of Ignorance

Virgin birth controversy enjoys a privileged status in the history of anthropology and reflects the exceptional interest anthropology takes in “biological facts” of human procreation. In the widest sense, this controversy centers around procreative beliefs, or more precisely, the “discovery” of people who were considered to be ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity and the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy (in humans). This paper offers an overview of the main theoretical approaches and an insight into the variety of empirical findings presented by the numerous participants in the virgin birth debate. It especially focuses on a critical assessment of the provided argumentation on the subject of procreative ignorance, as well as the matter of interpretation of ethnographical facts and an analysis of the meaning of “biological facts” from a cross-cultural perspective.

DECOLONISING KNOWLEDGE: REFLECTIONS ON COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND A HUMANITIES SEMINAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE

This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humanities Faculty at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein campus in 2017. The paper’s opening sections present a rationale for the seminar. I maintain that there is considerable scholarship illuminating how colonialpower shaped the knowledge which academic disciplines generated about Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of it is focused on anthropology, the discipline centred on Europe’s non-Western ‘others’ and implicated in latecolonial government. Despite the influence of this and related critiques globally, with their focus on power-knowledge relationships, such work has not substantially permeated South Africa’s Afrikaans universities. There, humanities disciplineswere largely isolated from global knowledge flows during the apartheid era and continue to emerge from this insular past. The paper then discusses the seminar itself and what I see as its three main contributions: creating space for an open-endedexchange about colonial knowledge and its legacies, engaging critically with the language of decolonisation, and grounding discussion of decolonisation in scholarship on Africa’s colonial history, including the history of anthropology. Bytracing these dynamics, the paper offers a unique perspective on the unfolding conversation about decolonisation in South Africa, highlighting a specific initiative aimed at contributing to decolonising knowledge at one South African university.Moreover, the paper suggests how historical literature pertaining to anthropology speaks to decolonising knowledge at the UFS and Afrikaans universities generally, where questions of colonial knowledge and power have long been obscured. In this manner, the paper moves the topic of decolonisation from highly abstract and/or politically symbolic claims into a specific context, where engaging certain scholarly texts may make a demonstrable intervention.

Antropólogos, missionários e imagens do continente africano - entrevista com Eric Morier-Genoud

Eric Morier-Genoud é Senior Lecturer na Queen’s Belfast University, Reino Unido. Fundador e ex-editor-chefe da revista Social Sciences & Missions ele publicou no ano passado a monografia Catholicism and the Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940-1986 . Nesta entrevista, o professor Morier-Genoud, nos conta a respeito da sua trajetória acadêmica e dos itinerários que o levaram a se interessar por atividades missionárias no continente africano. Os objetos e contatos de pesquisa, permitiram a ele transitar entre a História e as Ciências Sociais ao longo de sua carreira. Suas indagações inovadoras oferecem pontos instigantes a respeito das relações entre colonialismo, ciência e religião. Assim, convidamos as leitoras e leitores a seguir as histórias de imagens de missionários africanos ou os dilemas deixados pela guerra civil em Moçambique, como modos de pensar histórias da antropologia.Palavras-chave: Antropologia da África; Antropologia das Missões; História da Antropologia; Moçambique.Eric Morier-Genoud is Senior Lecturer on Queen’s Belfast University, United Kingdom. Founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the Social Sciences & Missions Journal, he published last year the monograph Catholicism and the Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940-1986. On this interview, professor Morier-Genoud, tells about his academic trajectory and the itineraries that led his interests for missionary activities on the African continent. The research objects and contacts allowed him to transit between History and Social Sciences throughout his career. His innovating questions offer instigating points concerning the relations amongst colonialism, science and religion. Thus we invite the readers to follow the stories of African missionary images or the dilemmas left by the civil war in Mozambique, as ways of thinking about the histories of anthropology. Key words: African Anthropology; Missions Anthropology; History of Anthropology; Mozambique.