ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Histories and Historiographies of the Human Sciences in the Americas during the Long 1970s

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Compared to the work done on the 1950s and 1960s, historians of the human sciences have paid relatively little attention to work done in the various fields in the 1970s. The period between the 1968 and 1984 American presidential elections saw profound political, social, cultural, and economic changes, often glossed as a reaction to earlier radicalism marked by a transition to neoliberalism and a precursor to postmodernism, and the disciplines of the human sciences were both affected by and key contributors to wider contemporary conversations. At the same time, a more focussed examination of this time and of how it has previously been represented provides essential context for the changes and contestations in the human sciences and how their histories have been written in the 1980s and beyond, including the growth of the disciplines and of the diversity of voices contributing to them. This roundtable will explore the legacies and lessons drawn from historical analyses of the human sciences as they were practiced in long 1970s both in the context of earlier disciplinary questions and concerns and in the context of wider social and political forces. The participants in this session will examine theoretical, methodological, and institutional aspects across a range of human sciences including: the emergence of a global anthropology of the future in relation to Indigeneity during the 1970s; the connections between the history of sociobiology and the history of the second radical science movement; the role of empiricism in the human and life sciences in concealing violence against Indigenous groups in Paraguay; the relationship between medical anthropology and transcultural psy-ences in transnational contexts; the connections between the Smithsonian and action anthropologists; and the emergence of American Indian Studies as a social science.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Robert Hancock, University of Victoria

Participants

• Taylor Elizabeth Dysart, University of Pennsylvania

• Nayanika Ghosh, Duke University

• Sebastián Gil-Riaño, University of Pennsylvania

• Robert Hancock, University of Victoria

• Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society

• Joanna Radin, Yale

Session Organizer

• Robert Hancock, University of Victoria