Central Sites, Peripheral Visions

Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology

Richard Handler

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780299219208
• eBook ISBN: 9780299219239
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Forensic Science
• Index: Social Sciences

The terms "center" and "periphery" are particularly relevant to anthropologists, since traditionally they look outward from institutional "centers"-universities, museums, government bureaus-to learn about people on the "peripheries." Yet anthropology itself, as compared with economics, politics, or history, occupies a space somewhat on the margins of academe.  Still, anthropologists, who control esoteric knowledge about the vast range of human variation, often find themselves in a theoretically central position, able to critique the "universal" truths promoted by other disciplines.

Central Sites, Peripheral Visions presents five case studies that explore the dilemmas, moral as well as political, that emerge out of this unique position. From David Koester's analysis of how ethnographic descriptions of Iceland marginalized that country's population, to Kath Weston's account of an offshore penal colony where officials mixed prison work with ethnographic pursuits; from Brad Evans's reflections on the "bohemianism" of both the Harlem vogue and American anthropology, to Arthur J. Ray's study of anthropologists who serve as expert witnesses in legal cases, the essays in the eleventh volume of the History of Anthropology Series reflect on anthropology's always problematic status as centrally peripheral, or peripherally central. 

Finally, George W. Stocking, Jr., in a contribution that is almost a book in its own right, traces the professional trajectory of American anthropologist Robert Gelston Armstrong, who was unceremoniously expelled from his place of privilege because of his communist sympathies in the 1950s. By taking up Armstrong's unfinished business decades later, Stocking engages in an extended meditation on the relationship between center and periphery and offers "a kind of posthumous reparation," a page in the history of the discipline for a distant colleague who might otherwise have remained in the footnotes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Anthropology on the Periphery of the Center
• The Power of Insult: Ethnographic Publication and Emergent Nationalism in the Sixteenth Century / David Koester
• Escape from the Andamans: Tracking, Offshore Incarceration, and Ethnology in the Back of Beyond / Kath Weston
• Where Was Boas during the Renaissance in Harlem? Diffusion, Race, and the Culture Paradigm in the History of Anthropology / Brad Evans
• Unfinished Business: Robert Gelston Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the History of Anthropology at Chicago and in Nigeria / George W. Stocking, Jr.
• Kroeber and the California Claims: Historical Particularism and Cultural Ecology in Court / Arthur J. Ray
• Index