Valorizing Our Ancestors and Elders: Remembering Ira E. Harrison

Abstract

Ira Harrison demonstrated his dedication to the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) in the various roles he played over time as southern regional representative, president, and archivist. His example encouraged me to become active in the association. As part of the de facto “cabinet” of three presidents (Tony Whitehead, Ira Harrison, and Michael Blakey), I volunteered to edit the newsletter, Notes from the ABA, and organize sessions for AAA meetings. Eventually, I ran for president and won. I found my namesake’s commitment to documenting the history of the ABA and Black anthropologists inspiring. The seminal contributions he made by organizing sessions, writing a brief history of the ABA (I. Harrison 1987), and launching the publication initiative on Black “ancestors and elders” opened the gate for interventions in the history and politics of anthropology. His insistence that Black anthropologists receive the recognition they deserve led him to collaborate with Glenn Jordan (1990), whose essays on St. Clair Drake had a significant impact on our thinking about rehistoricizing anthropology. Jordan was active in the early phases of the work that resulted in AfricanAmerican Pioneers in Anthropology (Harrison and Harrison 1999), a widely read collection that is being expanded for a second edition. After Jordan moved to Wales to do research, he encouraged me to replace him as co-editor. Working together on such an important initiative was the logical thing for Ira and me to do. We both were at the University of Tennessee. My ABA presidency coincided with the first two years I worked there. During that time, the ABA launched Transforming Anthropology (1990) and Decolonizing Anthropology (1991) after building up momentum for them over a few years. Ira and I saw Pioneers as part of a larger decolonizing project (Harrison 1991). Before I moved to Knoxville, I edited a festschrift honoring St. Clair Drake (Harrison 1988). In the introduction, I interrogated the hierarchies that relegated Drake along with Allison Davis, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and W.E.B. Du Bois to an epistemic periphery. A few years later, I co-edited a special issue of Critique of Anthropology that placed Du Bois and the early Black anthropologists he influenced within the discipline’s genealogy (Harrison and Nonini 1992). Those publications allowed me to rehearse ideas that Ira and I adapted for African-American Pioneers. Our cumulative work on Black intellectuals and/ in US anthropology has informed a significant corpus of scholarship. Lee Baker’s (1998) history of anthropology and race has had a tremendous impact. Irma McClaurin (2001) has raised the visibility of Black feminist anthropologists as producers of analysis and theory. Lynn Bolles (2001) has illuminated Black women ancestors’ generative role in making a Black feminist tradition possible in anthropology. My writings have elaborated the parameters for a critical anthropology of anthropology wherein race, gender, and (trans)national location are at the center of analysis and theorizing (Harrison 2008, 2016). Jafari Allen and Ryan Jobson (2016) address the implications of the wider “decolonizing generation,” whose interventions include Pioneers and kindred work. Pioneers also influenced Native American and Latinx anthropologists resuscitating their ancestors and elders. Appreciating my decolonial, rehistoricized perspective, Lakota anthropologst Beatrice Medicine invited me to write one of two forewords in Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining Native (Medicine 2001). Also, M erida M. R ua and Arlene Torres (2010) drew on Pioneers and Drake’s festschrift in rescuing Elena Padilla from erasure. Representing more recent scholarship, The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (Harrison, Johnson-Simon, and Williams 2018) examines the 1960s cohort. Historian David A. Varel’s (2018) book on Allison Davis draws on Pioneers, and Mark Anderson (2019) substantiates the generative thought of African Americans in repudiating white supremacy in the anthropology of the 1920s–70s, including that of Boasians usually lauded for their liberal antiracism. The work invested in the American Anthropologist’s special section on white supremacy is commendable.