Decolonization and the History of Americanist Anthropology: Introduction to the Special Issue

In recent years, anthropologists ’ sense of the history of their discipline has oscillated be-tween extremes of paralyzing villainization and defensive hero worship. Conferences and publications have seen various constituencies struggle over the legacies both of individuals and of the traditions of conceptualization and practice they helped to create. In such a context, Akhil Gupta ’ s recent presidential address “ Decolonizing US Anthro-pology, ” given at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2021, represents a welcome effort toward a more complex assessment and an opportunity to think through how we narrate the history of anthropology in relation to the various concerns now understood as decolonization. In the version published — after much discussion — as an article in the American Anthropologist , Gupta and coauthor Jesse Stoolman present an ambitious survey of a range of issues ranging from genocide and slavery to borders and nationalism, all chosen for their relevance to transforming anthropology into a “ decolonizing project ” (2023:779). Although they cite abundant work showing what anthropologists have done on such issues, their citations, most dating back only to 2000, suggest such concerns have arisen only in the discipline ’ s most recent generation. For Gupta and Stoolman, the endeavors of the generations of anthropologists before our own provide the materials only for at most a “ counterfactual ” history of decolonization — conjectures about what might have been possible, had those earlier generations only tried. Such an approach, however, erases the important work that was done in the past; we need turn to a conjectural “ counterfactual history ” only when factual history is impossible. The articles in this issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research all seek the histories waiting to be discovered in the decades where Gupta and Stoolman see only absence — histories offering insights into anthropological com-plicities and contentions relevant not only to our sense of the past, but to our present