Putting the “Human” Back into the Human Sciences: Reflections on the History of Anthropology in the West

To quote Jan Goldstein in the opening paragraph of her 1987 study of French psychiatry “Somewhere around 1800 investigators claiming scientific status and authority began to fasten their attention on the lives of ordinary people…. Among the many human sciences thrown up by this far-reaching development” was anthropology (Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify, 1987). In its nineteenth-century Western professional incarnation, anthropology meant for the most part the physical study and ranking of the different races of humanity, past and present. The most prominent branch of this emergent anthropology was racial science, which became – ironically -- a most profoundly dehumanizing science; yet when a twentieth-century school of socio-cultural anthropology challenged the belief that “race” determined human capacity, it later stood accused of living off the brutal European empires that enabled modern fieldwork in the first place. As this brief description suggests, both post-Holocaust and post-colonial agendas have led scholars to focus almost exclusively on how earlier anthropologists failed to respect the human differences that they studied. But have presentist political agendas in the academy also constrained historical inquiry by overlooking the specific historical contexts in which this discipline developed? In my presentation I will suggest new directions emerging in the history of anthropology that emphasize anthropology’s liberating potential in the past, as well as its darker side.