Gabriella D’Agostino &Vincenzo Matera (Eds.) Histories of Anthropology.Cham: Palgrave Macmillan,2023, 676 pp.

Authors : Frederico Delgado Rosa

Pages : 593-598

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Publication Date : 2025-05-01

Article Type : Other Papers

Abstract :With its twenty chapters plus an introduction by the editors, this massive volume is a collective exploration – and questioning – of the centre-periphery dialectics in the history of anthropology by a team of over twenty-five scholars. It is no detail that all but four of them are Italian.2 Quite the contrary, the fact that this project “is certainly an Italian point of view about the stories of anthropology” (p. 16) is explicitly addressed from the start. Aware of the risks and limitations of covering a broad range of scholarly traditions from this situated if not “partisan” (sic) vantage point, D’Agostino and Matera boldly defend the joint venture in the following terms: “we intended to make a contribution to anthropological narratives on behalf of an academic context that is not given much widespread visibility in spite of its international exchanges” (ibid.) – witness, for example, the absence of an entry on Italian anthropology in Hillary Callan’s The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (2018). It is certainly no coincidence, the editors add, that the initiative came “from Italy, one of the world’s Souths” (p. 30). This remark subtly redresses the volume’s potential shortcomings by pointing out that it is no longer possible to uncritically reproduce George Stocking’s centre-periphery narrative according to which “anthropology at the periphery seems neither so nationally varied nor so sharply divergent from that of the center” (as quoted on p. 21) – the centre referring basically to the North American, the British, and the French anthropological traditions as the most influential internationally and arguably the most relevant. While this remains unquestioned to a point, there is room for an alternative, less hegemonic perspective in the wake of the world anthropologies paradigm.
Keywords : Gabriella D’Agostino, Vincenzo Matera, Histories of Anthropology