Voicing the Ancestors: Readings for the Present from Anthropology’s Past

Voicing the Ancestors is a genre for recovering, reinterpreting, and sharing work from the past in service of present-day theory and practice. But since it was started to honor the memory of a scholar who is often remembered as having opposed just such projects as “presentism,” explanation is needed.

I provide that explanation in my essay about Stocking’s early criticism of presentism, its forgotten historical context, and his later changes of mind. Then, Carolyn Rouse brings to light Claude Lévi-Strauss’s surprisingly pertinent 1952 booklet on Race and History and explains why he was right that the concepts of race and progress must be debunked conjointly. Grant Arndt recovers in the backstory to Nancy Lurie’s theory of Indigenous activism an often-forgotten tradition of collaborative activist anthropology in Native North America. Arzoo Osanloo finds in an unlikely text by Robert Redfield a powerful old-yet-new understanding of the problem with employing legal means of redress for crimes like gender violence that bring shame upon victims. And Rena Lederman describes a remarkable collection of texts assembled by Mary Douglas that Douglas herself loved and that conveys a counterintuitive message about the sources of people’s moral judgments that is hard to swallow for anyone, but especially for many twenty-first-century undergraduates.


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Ethno/Graphic Storytelling: Communicating Research and Exploring Pedagogical Approaches through Graphic Narratives, Drawings, and Zines

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Year in Review: In the Time of Public Anthropologies