Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology

Seeking to widen the anthropological past, and in doing so, invigorate contemporary anthropological practice, this volume focuses on little-known scholars who contributed to the anthropological work of their time, such as John William Jackson, the members of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, Charlotte Gower Chapman and Lucie Varga. Essays on Marius Barbeau and Sol Tax present figures who were centrally located in the anthropologies of their day but who are not currently well remembered. A final essay analyses notions of ""the canon"" and considers the place of a classic ethnographic area, highland New Guinea, in anthropological canon-formation. The essays illustrate different processes of inclusion and exclusion in the history of anthropology. Taken together, their aim is to suggest a larger project of historical recuperation that contemporary anthropologists should find increasingly relevant to both their theoretical and their political concerns.