Pluralising Anthropology's Histories Part 2

Abstract (English)

Given anthropology’s conflicted past, how do you teach its history to new anthropologists? This question provoked a 2023 collective syllabus project in the Brandeis University Anthropology Department. Rather than abandoning our ambiguous history, we aimed to recast it through a lens that includes authors, concepts, and debates from the past that directly engage that ambiguity, thus pluralizing anthropology’s ambiguous past.
These two panels include graduate students from Brandeis and elsewhere who respond to this provocation, recasting and pluralizing anthropology’s history through a lens that includes authors, concepts, and debates from the past that directly engage that ambiguity.
In our collective, we created a shared resource of texts from which to craft a syllabus, and continue to reference that resource. In doing so, we reconfigured the dynamics of a traditional syllabus (in which the student has limited say in the content and works not included vanish from sight). This process allowed us to observe one another’s grappling with what should be included in the endeavor of telling the “history of anthropological thought” and with what implications.
We sought out the work of contemporary scholars at the margins (who may or may not have been fully recognized at the time) in conversation with those now deemed canonical, or grappling with the same questions of authority, inclusion, and politics that projects of retrospective critique seek to resolve. We approached these questions as they recurred, cyclically, yet also engaging with particular moments (the eugenics movement, Panafricanism, World War I, feminism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, etc.).
Papers in these linked panels consider B.R.Ambedkar’s education in the 1910s at Columbia University, as incorporated into his anti-caste theory, politics, and praxis, the more-than-human within anthropologies, anthropologies in and of Asia, performance as a theoretical– and political– stance, and the application of a pluralized view of anthropological history to undergraduate courses such Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology.
By linking historical texts with marginalized voices and contemporary concerns, the initiative not only pluralizes traditional canons but also reimagines the possibilities for anthropological theory and education.