The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held in-person in New Orleans, LA from November 19-23, 2025. The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the preliminary program.

The annual meeting of the History of Science Society will be held in-person in New Orleans, LA from November 13-16, 2025. The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the conference program.

At the Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London. Tuesday, November 11, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Join us for a conversation with Noga Arikha about her new biography of Franz Boas: In Praise of Open Minds. This event aims to introduce Boas's ideas, outline their genesis in Germany, their impact in the US and beyond - and their continuing relevance today. This accessible intellectual biography traces Boas’s life and scientific passions, from his roots in Germany and his move to the United States in 1884, partly in response to growing antisemitism in Germany, to his work with First Nations communities and his influential role as a teacher, mentor, and engaged activist who inspired an entire generation.

This workshop, timed to follow the Economic History Society conference, aims to bring together scholars who have engaged with the Murdock Atlas in their research, and who are interested in an open, cross-disciplinary, and forward-looking conversation on the merits, limitations, and pitfalls of using the Atlas in social science research.

Richard Handler (2012, 179) once called Erving Goffman “the most anthropological of all the great sociologists.” This trenchant remark draws attention to Goffman’s distinctive relationship with anthropology and, more broadly, to the close—yet often overlooked—ties between the sociology and anthropology programs at the University of Chicago, where Goffman was trained.

Sergei Kan A Maverick Boasian: The Life and Work of Alexander A. Goldenweiser University of Nebraska Press, 2023 268 pages, 16 photographs, notes, references, index. A Maverick Boasian is a biography of a distinctive and exasperating figure in early American cultural anthropology. Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940) was a lesser-known member of the first cohort of Franz Boas’s graduate students at Columbia University.

HAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. In our effort to highlight recently published works, please note that we have included Prakash Shah's 2025 article on Durkheim's focus on religion in India and Vincent L. Femia's article, also from 2025, on the relatively unknown late 19th century American anthropologist Anita Newcomb McGee. Both authors are new to HAR's bibliography. 

HAR is pleased to announce two complementary articles (in English) on recent and crucial chapters in the history of Brazilian Anthropology in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie. De Souza Lima, Antonio Carlos, & Caio Gonçalves Dias, 2025. “Waking the Zombies: Anthropology in Ultra /Neoliberal Brazil,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l'anthropologie. Tambascia, Christiano Key, Fernanda Arêas Peixoto, & Gustavo Rossi, 2025.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Bérose: an article (in English) on a lesser-known facet of Van Gennep’s anthropology. This is one of a series of 11 articles dedicated to Van Gennep in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie. Laurière, Christine, 2025. “The Struggle for Ethnography: Van Gennep and Marcel Mauss as Enemy Brothers…

HAR is happy to share information about an exciting upcoming international workshop from our friends at HOAN-EASA.  Transnational Entanglements of Racial Anthropology: History and Legacy, will take place in Berlin and online between September 11 and 13, 2025 (all times CET), bringing international scholars worldwide.  The workshop has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, DFG (German Research Council), and HOAN, and will be livestreamed, enabling our online HOAN viewers to listen to the various presentations to ask questions through the chat.

We are pleased to announce continuation of the working group on the History of the Language Sciences, hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Meetings will take place via Zoom on the second Tuesday of each month at 9:00 Eastern in the upcoming academic year. This year, presentations and discussions will focus on archives in the history and historiography of the language sciences (linguistic anthropology notably included).

Participant Observation (Conference Report), History of Anthropology Review Yale University, March 31-April 1, 2025 In the face of palpable climate change, contemporary anthropologists increasingly explore how social forms, subsistence technologies, and administrative logics respond to—and may also drive— ecological transformations. Contemporary ethnographers detail sites of nonhuman agency, Indigenous knowledge, extractive destruction, and climate-related migration. The terms and emphases have changed, but such questions are far from new.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on Alfred Lyall’s colonial ethnography and anthropology in India. Fuller, Chris, 2025. “‘The Most Subtle‑Minded and Profoundly Devout People in Asia’: Alfred Lyall on Hinduism, Caste and the State in Colonial India,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology…

In partnership with BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, HAR is honored to announce the release of a previously unpublished manuscript by Signe Howell, who passed away on January 26, 2025. Howell, Signe, 2025. “My Anthropology: A Personal and Intellectual Adventure,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris. Signe Howell (1942–2025) was a Norwegian social anthropologist, trained at the University of Oxford.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: two articles (in English) on Margaret Mead’s fieldwork experience and its ethnographic outcomes. Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1925‑1930),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris. Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1931‑1939),”

The History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) has launched a new initiative. Every two years, HPGRG will offer a small award of £150 to support projects which seek to widen audience engagement within the history and philosophy of geography. Projects which meet our criteria might include public engagement through presentations, media presence, artwork, workshops, exhibitions, and other events, ideally in collaboration with museums, archives, learned societies and institutions, galleries and libraries, whose collections and purposes relate to themes about the histories and philosophies of geography.

The support for refugee scholars to come to the United States of America in the 1930s and 1940s is well known. Varian Fry famously helped several hundred European artists and intellectuals to flee …

The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) of the American Anthropological Association is pleased to announce the inaugural competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division that provides a gathering place for discussions of the history of anthropology and the human sciences. This prize will be awarded to a paper about the history of anthropology, broadly construed.

In the anthropological canon, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) has emerged in recent decades as one of the most important—and overlooked—ethnographers of her time. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but poor health and financial troubles plagued her final years. After Hurston’s passing in 1960, Alice Walker rediscovered her unmarked grave (along with much of her work) thirteen years later.

There’s a lot happening at the History of Anthropology Review. First, this spring’s Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures conference, co-hosted by HAR and the Yale History of Science and Medicine Program, was a great success. Across two days of panels and conversations, we explored how anthropologists have studied and theorized relations among social forms, ideas, and environments from the late nineteenth century to today—looking at useful insights as well as toxic legacies from both celebrated and neglected paradigms.

It is overwhelming to comment on the panel of a brilliant group of women—towering figures in the field—whose work I have long admired and whose personal friendship and mentoring I have benefited from since arriving in Australia five years ago as a newly minted PhD. I of course can’t do justice to this collection of papers—either their theoretical insights or the power of their personal experiences.

We are here for a conversation about gender as an analytical lens on the relationship between theory and fieldwork in anthropology. It has been suggested that we talk about this through personal narratives from those of us who have been involved in anthropology in Australia for some time. In Papua New Guinea, where my husband (and colleague) Alan Rumsey and I have been going since 1981, I have recently written about the changing roles and relations of women to warfare, which was colonially suppressed but then has re-emerged at times in the region of the Western Highlands we are familiar with.

Re: Creation of the International Institute for Afro-American Studies For years there has been the intention of founding a center devoted especially to the problems of the Black populations of America, of their study, their history, their cultures, etc. But time and again, opposition to this project had arisen…The time seemed to have come to build such an organism, without official status and with…

Zora Neale Hurston The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel Edited and with commentary by Deborah G. Plant Amistad, 2025 xxvii + 334 pages Review followed by an editor Q&A. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African American novelist, scholar, and filmmaker, was born to a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher in Alabama. In 1894, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where her father was elected mayor, and she discovered an early love for literature.

All memorializing practices afford new forms of synthesis. Writing now in my late sixties about myself as a feminist anthropologist foregrounds for me the importance of the habitus we acquire in our primary socialization for shaping what we consciously think of and write about as our own, or even as collective, intellectual and political projects.