HOAN-Meetings (HOAN-M)

Coordinated by HOAN convenors, HOAN-M are meant to be friendly f2f/virtual spaces to meet and mingle, share ideas and news. HOAN-M offer an open stage to HOAN members and sister organisations to highlight new research/books/articles/activities, as well as to discuss current or sensitive issues in our subdisciplinary field. HOAN-M are thought to be international permanent spaces to meet/confront with friends and colleagues from different European countries – and beyond – that share the same interests and research topics.

HOAN Meetings (HOAN-M) will be held every four months.

4th HOAN-meeting
Friday 18th November 2022, at 5pm CET

Program:
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Hande Birkalan Gedik
17:05 Keynote speaker: Regna Darnell (University of Western Ontario):
“A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge"
17:25 Open forum for questions and comments
17:30 HOAN Correspondents presentation:
- Peter G.A. Versteeg (Netherlands)
- Vida Savoniakaite (Lithuania)
17:45 Open forum for questions and comments
17:50 Frederico Delgado Rosa, Han Vermeulen: presentation of Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork (1870-1922), Berghahn, 2022
18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors

“A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge”
Please find here the video-recording of Regna Darnell’s lecture.

➤ View Abstract The Histories of Anthropology Network (HOAN)addresses anthropology's multiple histories. The plurality of its mandate constitutes a rallying point for diverse interests across conventional silos of knowledge accumulation and practice, with the potential to reach other audiences and publics in the academy and beyond. I have addressed specific audiences from my vantage point as an interdisciplinary historian of anthropology and linguistics. By and large, the audience for these discourses remains a closed circle of known colleagues and familiar ways of speaking to one another. I argue that the variables emerging in these discourses recur across them. We urgently need a new paradigm retaining the value of the particular, while seeking generalization through cycles of change and geographic location. What I call "transportable knowledge" toggles between them in a paradigm shift from the history of anthropology that emerged in the 1960's to address causes and rationales of what happened in the past. The new model foregrounds the complexity of decision-making in a rapidly changing world using available information. Read in context, in hindsight non-optimal choices avoid what I call "assassination by anachronism."

Regna Darnell is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita and Adjunct Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. Her work injects interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives across disciplinary silos and carries them into public life. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Regna Darnell

Photo Credit: Taken by the request of Prof. Darnell

3rd HOAN-meeting
Friday 22nd April 2022, at 17:00 CET
Program:
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Frederico Delgado Rosa
17:05 Keynote speaker Rosemary Lévi Zumwalt (Agnes Scott College), “Franz Boas: Working for Social Justice and Battling Social Inequality”
17:25 Open forum for questions and comments
17:30 HOAN Correspondents presentations:

17:50 Open forum for questions and comments
17:55 Grażyna Kubica-Heller: presentation of the Malinowski centennial conference, Cracow September 2022
18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors

“Franz Boas: Working for Social Justice and Battling Social Inequality”

➤ View Abstract Abstract: Elsie Clews Parsons wrote Robert Lowie about her reactions to the chapter on Boas in his History of Ethnological Theory. While offering praise for his “very just and discerning appraisal,” she remarked, “You do not mention his ardor in combating the scientific fallacies which bolster up social injustices. This has been more marked, of course, in recent years but it was always there and is an essential part of his make-up.” She mentioned a studio portrait of himself that Boas had given Parsons with the inscription, “Elsie Clews Parsons, fellow in the struggle for freedom from prejudice.” Parsons concluded, “I began that way and he ends that way. I suppose somewhere our trails crossed”[1]. In this paper, I will draw from my recent manuscript – Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice (University of Nebraska, fall 2022) – for a focus on Boas’s work for social justice, specifically with respect to race.
[1] Parsons to Lowie, January 6, 1938, Lowie Papers; see Zumwalt, Wealth and Rebellion, 170.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Dean of the College Emerita at Agnes Scott College, is co-author with Isaac Jack Lévy of Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits and Healing the Sick (2002). Her most recent publication is Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice (2022), which is a continuation of her Franz Boas: The Emergence of Anthropology.

Photo credit: Barbara McGinness

2nd HOAN-Meeting
Friday 19th November 2021, at 17:00 CET
Program:
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Frederico Delgado Rosa.
17:05 Keynote Speaker Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo): “Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery”
17:30 Open forum for questions and comments
17:45 HOAN Correspondents presentation:

18:30 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors

“Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery”

➤ View Abstract There are many unknown pioneers in the history of anthropology, often publishing in smaller languages and based far from the centres of academic capital. I will present and compare two of them in this lecture. Eilert Sundt (1817–75) carried out systematic research on various aspects of everyday life in rural Norway in the mid-19th century and is recognised as the first Norwegian social scientist. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, he wrote about controversial subjects such as extramarital sex and hygiene. Sundt, a contemporary of Comte and Marx, saw sociology and ethnology as tools for enlightened social policy. A century later, Gutorm Gjessing (1906–79), who held the Chair at the Ethnographic Museum, had comparable aims. Trained as an archaeologist, Gjessing published extensively on colonialism, inequality, and environmental challenges, arguing that anthropology needed to take on urgent global challenges to remain relevant. Today, Sundt is revered but little read, while Gjessing virtually disappeared from the genealogy of anthropology in Norway. What they had in common was social engagement. This merits a reconsideration of their significance from the vantage-point of the Anthropocene.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His textbooks in anthropology are widely used and translated, and his research has dealt with social and cultural dimensions of globalisation, ranging from nationalism and identity politics to accelerated change and environmental crisis. He is currently writing a book about the effects of overheated globalisation on biodiversity and cultural diversity.

1st HOAN-Meeting
Friday 12th March 2021, at 15:00 CET
Program:
15:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Frederico Delgado Rosa
15:05 Presentation of "Anthropological Pathways and Crossings: Knowledge Production and Transfer in and beyond Europe", a joint virtual conference of EASA’s Europeanist Network (EuroNet) and History of Anthropology Network (HOAN), by Patrícia Ferraz de Matos and Hande Birkalan-Gedik
15:15 Keynote Speaker Andre Gingrich (ISA at the Austrian Academy of Sciences): "Hidden Connections and Broken Trajectories: Some Personal Reflections on Relations between German-speaking and International Socio-cultural Anthropology across the 20th Century"
Please find  here the audio-recording of Andre Gingrich’s lecture, for those using Firefox download it here
15:40 Open forum for questions and comments
16:00 HOAN Correspondents presentation:

17:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors

"Hidden Connections and Broken Trajectories: Some Personal Reflections on Relations between German-speaking and International Socio-cultural Anthropology across the 20th Century"
Please find here the audio-recording of Andre Gingrich’s lecture.
For those using Firefox download it here.

Andre Gingrich is an Austrian ethnologist and anthropologist, member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, director of the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and retired professor at the University of Vienna. Between 1998 and 2017 he was a full professor at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Since 2003, he is director of the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

Photo Credit: Mehmet Emir, ISA at the OeAW

 

HOAN zoom meeting