The ‘commons and borderland’ of geography and anthropology

The ‘commons and borderland’ of geography and anthropology (Strathern 2004).

Emily Hayes (Independent Researcher), Jaanika Vider (University of Oxford), Dr Sophie Scott-Brown (Independent Researcher)

Geographers are beginning to discern the historical mutualism between anthropology and geography and the manifestation of this within the context of the BAAS Section E meetings and the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) publication Hints to Travellers as professional disciplinary identities were fashioned in the second half of the nineteenth century (Ryan 1997; Driver, 2001; Withers 2010). Drawing on the aforementioned scholarship, histories of anthropology (Stocking 1971 & 1996; Kouper 1973; Kuklick 1991; Houtman and Knight 1995; Mills 2003; Silletoe 2004; Sera-Shriar 2013), and the archives and collections of the RGS, the session will consider the co-evolution of the nascent disciplines of anthropology and geography in the nineteenth-century fin-de-siecle era and early twentieth century.

We will aim to explore the following themes:

– the symbiosis and divergence between the disciplines and their institutional hubs

– demographics of knowledge producers and audiences

– geographies of knowledge production

– knowledge-making strategies with material and visual media