Regna Darnell - Böcker

Standards. We apply them, uphold them, or fail to meet them. But how do they get made? Through twelve ethnographic case studies, The Social Life of Standards reveals how standards – political and technical tools for organizing society – are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with norms often created by others. Contributors explore standards at work across different countries and contexts, such as Ebola biomedical safety precautions in Senegal, Colombian farmers contesting politicized seed regulations, and the application of Indigenous standards to Canadian environmental assessments. They emphasize the uncomfortable fit between the inconsistent implementation of standards in the real world and the non-negotiable criteria presupposed by external forces.The Social Life of Standards provides support for a reflexive process that involves local engagement. Ultimately, the goal should be to reach a balance between evidence-based science and the social contexts that can inform more useful and appropriate standards.

Standards. We apply them, uphold them, or fail to meet them. But how do they get made? Through twelve ethnographic case studies, The Social Life of Standards reveals how standards – political and technical tools for organizing society – are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with norms often created by others. Contributors explore standards at work across different countries and contexts, such as Ebola biomedical safety precautions in Senegal, Colombian farmers contesting politicized seed regulations, and the application of Indigenous standards to Canadian environmental assessments. They emphasize the uncomfortable fit between the inconsistent implementation of standards in the real world and the non-negotiable criteria presupposed by external forces.The Social Life of Standards provides support for a reflexive process that involves local engagement. Ultimately, the goal should be to reach a balance between evidence-based science and the social contexts that can inform more useful and appropriate standards.

This collection challenges the prevailing notion that the Americanist Tradition in anthropology, typified by Franz Boas and his colleagues, is atheoretical. Contributions from twenty five distinguished scholars are brought together here to provide a comprehensive, accessible, state-of-the-art appraisal of interdisciplinary research in the areas of anthropology, linguistics, and Native Studies. Participants in this dialogue accepted the challenge of making their underlying theoretical assumptions explicit. Topics range from historical debates in anthropology and linguistics to recent innovations within the Americanist Tradition. The search for authenticity is brought to bear on discussion of changing traditions in texts and literacy, in linguistics and education, and in contemporary discourse spanning the Americas.Debate on the future of the Americanist Tradition forms a critical part of this collection. The volume juxtaposes Canadian and American theoretical work on language and revitalizes a shared tradition centred on the study of meaning. Readers are invited to enter this vibrant and open-ended Americanist discourse.

This first full-scale biography of Edward Sapir (1884–1939) does justice to the life and ideas of the most distinguished linguist of Boasian anthropology, who contributed substantially to the professionalization of linguistics as an independent discipline. Sapir was the first to apply comparative Indo-European methods to the study of American Indian languages, pursuing fieldwork on more than twenty of them. His theoretical work on the relationship between the individual personality and culture remains a major part of culture theory in anthropology, as does his insistence on the symbolic nature of culture and the importance of culture as understood and articulated by its members. The first professional anthropologist in Canada and teacher of a whole generation of North American linguists and anthropologists at Chicago and Yale, Sapir also wrote poetry and literary criticism. He insisted on the humanistic nature of anthropology and was the most articulate spokesman for the interdisciplinary social science of the late 1920s and 1930s. All the richness and diversity of Sapir’s relatively short life are conveyed by Regna Darnell in an engrossing narrative that combines profound knowledge of her subject with historical reconstruction.

Volume 8 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, the premier series published in the history of the discipline, explores national anthropological traditions in Britain, the United States, and Europe and follows them into postnational contexts. Contributors reassess the major theorists in twentieth-century anthropology, including the work of luminaries such as Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Marshall Sahlins, as well as lesser-known but important anthropological work by Berthold Laufer, A. M. Hocart, Kenelm O. L. Burridge, and Robin Ridington, among others.These essays examine myriad themes such as the pedagogical context of the anthropologist as a teller of stories about indigenous storytellers; the colonial context of British anthropological theory and its projects outside the nation-state; the legacies of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism regarding culture- specific patterns; cognitive universals reflected in empirical examples of kinship, myth, language, classificatory systems, and supposed universal mental structures; and the career of Marshall Sahlins and his trajectory from neo-evolutionism and structuralism toward an epistemological skepticism of cross- cultural miscommunication.

Invisible Genealogies is a landmark reinterpretation of the history of anthropology in North America. During the past two decades, theorizing by many American anthropologists has called for an "experimental moment" grounded in explicit self-reflexive scholarship and experimentation with alternate forms of presentation. Such postmodern anthropology has effectively downplayed connections with past luminaries in the field, whose scholarship is perceived to be uncomfortably colonialist and nonreflexive. Ironically, as the American Anthropological Association nears its one hundredth anniversary and interest in the history of the discipline is at an all-time high, that history has been effectively presented as removed from and irrelevant to the new generation. Invisible Genealogies offers an alternative, compelling vision of the development of anthropology in North America, one that emphasizes continuity rather than discontinuity from legendary founder Franz Boas to the present. Regna Darnell identifies key interpretive assumptions and practices that have persisted, sometimes in modified form, since the groundbreaking work of A. L. Kroeber, Boas, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and A. Irving Hallowell during the founding decades of anthropology. Also highlighted are the Americanist roots of postmodern anthropology and the work of innovative recent scholars like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz.

American anthropology in the late twentieth century interrogated and depicted the worlds of others, past and present, in subtle and incisive ways while increasingly questioning its own authority to do so. Marxist, symbolic, and structuralist thought shaped the fieldwork and conclusions of many researchers around the globe. Practicing anthropology blossomed and grew rapidly as a subdiscipline in its own right. There emerged a keener appreciation of both the history of the discipline and the histories of those studied. Archaeologists witnessed a resurgence of interest in the concept of culture. The American Anthropologist also made systematic efforts to represent the field as a whole, with biological anthropology and linguistics particularly adept at crossing subdiscipline boundaries. Proliferation of specialized areas within sociocultural anthropology encouraged work across the subdisciplines. The thirty selections in this volume reflect the notable trends and accomplishments in American anthropology during the closing decades of the millennium. An introduction by Regna Darnell offers a historical background and critical context that enable readers to better understand the changes and continuity in American anthropology during this time.

The Histories of Anthropology Annual series presents diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and doing anthropology. Critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology are included.This ninth volume of the series, Corridor Talk to Culture History showcases geographic diversity by exploring how anthropologists have presented their methods and theories to the public and in general to a variety of audiences. Contributors examine interpretive and methodological diversity within anthropological traditions often viewed from the standpoint of professional consensus, the ways anthropological relations cross disciplinary boundaries, and the contrast between academic authority and public culture, which is traced to the professionalization of anthropology and other social sciences in the nineteenth century. Essays showcase the research and personalities of Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie, Harlan I. Smith, Fustel de Coulanges, Edmund Leach, Carl Withers, and Margaret Mead, among others.

This inaugural volume of The Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition series presents current scholarship from the various academic disciplines that were shaped and continue to be influenced by Franz Boas (1858–1942). Few of Boas's intellectual progeny span the range of his disciplinary and public engagements. In his later career, Boas moved beyond Native American studies to become a public intellectual and advocate for social justice, particularly with reference to racism against African Americans and Jews and discrimination against women in science. He was a passionate defender of academic freedom, rigorous scholarship, and anthropology as a humane calling. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 examines Boas's stature as a public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography, and activism. The volume's contributors move across many of the disciplines within which Boas himself worked, bringing to bear their expertise in Native studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology, museum studies, comparative literature, English, film studies, philosophy, and journalism. This volume demonstrates a contemporary urgency to reassessing Boas both within the field of anthropology and beyond.

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents localized perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology.This tenth volume of the series, Local Knowledge, Global Stage, examines worldwide historical trends of anthropology ranging from the assertion that all British anthropology is a study of the Old Testament to the discovery of the untranslated shorthand notes of pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Other topics include archival research into the study of Vancouver Island’s indigenous languages, explorations of the Christian notion of virgin births in Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Legend of Perseus, and the Canadian government’s implementation of European-model farms as a way to undermine Native culture. In addition to Boas and Hartland, the essays explore the research and personalities of Susan Golla, Claude LÉvi-Strauss, and others.

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology.Volume 11, Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, examines the work and influence of scholars, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, A. Irving Hallowell, and Edward Westermarck, and anthropological practices and theories in Vietnam and Ukraine as well as the United States. Contributions also focus on the influence of Western thought and practice on anthropological traditions, as well as issues of relativism, physical anthropology, language, epistemology, ethnography, and social synergy.

Histories of Anthropology Annual series presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology.Volume 12, Tracking Anthropological Engagements, examines the work and influence of Hans Sidonius Becker, Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Karl Popper, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as anthropological perspectives on the 1964 Project Camelot, Latin American cultures at the 1892 Madrid International Expositions, sixteenth-century cosmography and topography in Amazonia, the launch of the Great War Centenary Association website, and community-produced wartime narratives in Ontario, Canada.

Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology.Volume 13, Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, explores the interplay of identities and scholarship through the history of anthropology, with a special section examining fieldwork predecessors and indigenous communities in Native North America. Individual contributions explore the complexity of women’s history, indigenous history, national traditions, and oral histories to juxtapose what we understand of the past with its present continuities. These contributions include Sharon Lindenburger’s examination of Franz Boas and his navigation with Jewish identity, Kathy M’Closkey’s documentation of Navajo weavers and their struggles with cultural identities and economic resources and demands, and Mindy Morgan’s use of the text of Ruth Underhill’s O’odham study to capture the voices of three generations of women ethnographers.Because this work bridges anthropology and history, a richer and more varied view of the past emerges through the meticulous narratives of anthropologists and their unique fieldwork, ultimately providing competing points of access to social dynamics. This volume examines events at both macro and micro levels, documenting the impact large-scale historical events have had on particular individuals and challenging the uniqueness of a single interpretation of “the same facts.”

Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude LÉvi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.

In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology’s four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology’s forays into contemporary public intellectual debates.The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology’s historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

The series Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing the awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology.Volume 14, Centering the Margins of Anthropology’s History, focuses on the conscious recognition of margins and suggests it is time to bring the margins to the center, both in terms of a changing theoretical openness and a supporting body of scholarship-if not to problematize the very dichotomy of center and margins itself.The essays explore two major themes of anthropology’s margins. First, anthropologists and historians have long sought out marginalized and forgotten ancestors, arguing for their present-day relevance and offering explanations for the lack of attention to their contributions to theory, analysis, methods, and findings. Second, anthropologists and their historians have explored a range of genres to present their results in provocative and open-ended formats. This volume closes with an experimental essay that offers a dynamic, multifaceted perspective that captures one of the dominant (if sometimes marginalized) voices in history of anthropology. Steven O. Murray’s career developed at the institutional margins of several academic disciplines and activist discourses, but his distinctive voice has been, and will remain, at the center of our history.

In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology’s four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology’s forays into contemporary public intellectual debates.The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology’s historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude LÉvi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.

Recovering Ancestors in Anthropological Traditions, volume 15 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual, focuses on themes of individual scholars and national developments, with each specific case building toward an understanding of an international discipline. Similar to the cultures that anthropologists study, anthropology’s four-field discipline contains myriad practices, theories, and methodologies that are often divergent, contradictory, and associated with nationally based schools of thought, contributing to a vital and diverse global discipline.This volume emphasizes the challenges international scholars face as they engage both local and global movements. Several European traditions are represented, including two chapters adding to the body of work on Portugal from previous volumes in the series. North American traditions are well represented, including a collection of works on Nancy Lurie. Also included is an important examination of the collection of human skeletal remains in Argentina, presented in English for the first time. Readers will find both new information and new ways of understanding this complex history.

In Invisible Contrarian Regna Darnell and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz have assembled scholars to memorialize and celebrate the prescient vision and interdisciplinary contributions of the late Stephen O. Murray (1950–2019), who did pioneering research in ethnolinguistics and anthropology of gender and homosexuality. His socially relevant work continues to provide a cogent example of an emergent, forward-looking anthropology for the twenty-first century.Murray’s wide-ranging work included linguistics, regional ethnography in Latin America and Asia, activism, history of anthropology in relation to social sciences, and migration studies.Along with a complete list of his publications, Invisible Contrarian highlights Murray’s methodological innovations and includes key writings that remain little known, since he never pursued a tenured research position.  Murray’s significant, prolific contributions deserve not only to be reexamined but to be shared with contemporary and future audiences. Ideal both as a primer for those who have not yet read Murray’s work and as an in-depth resource for those already familiar with him, this volume demonstrates the wide-ranging accomplishments of a man who modeled how to be an independent scholar outside an academic position.

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