Invisible Genealogies
A History of Americanist Anthropology
- Publisher
- Nebraska Paperback
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2001
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780803266292
- Publish Date
- Mar 2001
- List Price
- $37.95
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Description
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.
About the author
Regna Darnell is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology Emerita at the University of Western Ontario. She is coeditor of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism (Nebraska, 2015). Darnell is the general editor of the multivolume series The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition and co-editor of the Critical Studies in History of Anthropology series.
Other titles by
Invisible Contrarian
Essays in Honor of Stephen O. Murray
History of Theory and Method in Anthropology
The History of Anthropology
A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America
Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History
Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 14
The Social Life of Standards
Ethnographic Methods for Local Engagement
Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories
Tracking Anthropological Engagements
Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations
Local Knowledge, Global Stage
Corridor Talk to Culture History
Public Anthropology and Its Consequences