Biography of Anthropologists

The 50 th anniversary of the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology seems propitious to look back into its history, not to review its contents and retell it but to attempt a reflection on its fundamentals. In this paper I circle the relationship between anthropology-archaeology, the museum-heritage and the nation-State from a localized space. Without losing sight of the historical problems, I ponder the connection between the scientific disciplines and power, and I reflect on the ways in which the Museum and the disciplines are engaged with the State's reproduction, along with its institutions, its hierarchies and its forms of identity. In the end, after this reflexive effort, I go back to the Museum of Anthropology to ask myself what should be done with it.

Tarak Chandra Das (1898-1964) was an anthropologist of Calcutta University.Das conducted extensive fieldworks in Chotanagpur in the then Bihar and in Assam.Das was interested in the application of Anthropology.Two books written by T.C. Das bears testimony of his observation and collection of data through anthropological fieldwork.. One is his monograph on the Purum Kuki tribe of north-eastern India. and the other is on the Great Bengal Famine during the Second World War.[Bengal famine (1943):As revealed in a survey of the destitutes of Calcutta,1949].

Born in 1935 to an immigrant Arab-speaking family from Aleppo, Syria, Salomón Nahmad-Sitton started as one of the few male students in social work and that work led him to anthropology, where he was quickly scooped up by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), the Mexican federal Indian agency, that, at that time, administered indigenous groups, their health, education and resources. In his career in the INI, Salomón made his career and reputation for getting in trouble, getting kicked out of Jalisco, Nayarit, Michoacán and Yucatán, to name a few, culminating when he was jailed in 1983 by the government of president Miguel de la Madrid, because he didn’t support his attempts to establish indigenous governance of the federal indigenous coordinating centers, especially the Plan Integral del Desarrollo de la Tribu Yaqui, 1983, developed by the Yaqui themselves.1 After a Fulbright in the US in the mid 1980s, he and his wife, Ximena Avellaneda, moved to Oaxaca, where he is a senior researcher and past director of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS).

This article recalls a discussion about Barack Obama’s mother and her biography which emerged during the course of the American presidential elections in 2008. S. Ann Dunham was a cultural anthropologist holding a PhD from the University of Hawaii and specializing in Indonesian peasant blacksmithing and cottage industry. She passed away in 1995 relatively unknown to the American anthropological world and totally unknown to the American public. Interest in Obama’s family made Dunham and her biography as well as her anthropology appear publicly. Even though she was labeled an “uncaring mother,” who was to “abandon” small Barack, a biographical book by Janny Scott published in 2011 depicts a deep and complex portrait of Dunham which does not go along with popular opinions. It is interesting to observe how Dunham’s biography has been constructed and how her family history mirrors transformation of American society and reveals entanglement between private life and anthropological interests.

For the record, there is nothing about the subject matter (human behavior, material culture, human communication, cognition, receiver-oriented perspectives, and inference) that marks any of it as particularly postmodern, scientific, or humanistic. But Schiffer's data language and theoretical principles do seem to be consistent with mainstream positivist science. Thus, this un-named approach is in direct opposition to the calls of many postmodernists to resist temptations to formulate and test formal positivist theories of any kind.