R Handler
Biographic Data
| ID | 9861 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Handler |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Handler |
| SIGNATURE | HANDLER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8742-9533 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 152 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 153 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Peer support groups as a participatory development principle
This paper reimagines peer support groups by centring a community’s worldviews. We engage with Iliso Lamakhosikazi, a women’s peer support group in South Africa, through an eight-week qualitative study embedded within nearly a decade of collaborative research. This study, using participatory observations, interviews, and focus groups, reveals how Iliso Lamakhosikazi reimagines peer support groups in terms of sociality, focus, and operational stru…
Expression games in Jane Austen and Erving Goffman
This paper brings together two brilliant analysts of social encounters, Jane Austen and Erving Goffman. It proceeds by applying some of Goffman's terms for face-to-face interactions to several scenes from Austen's novels in which characters try to extract information from others while preventing others from extracting information from them. In their treatment of these "expression games," both authors display a similar sociological sensibility. Th…
Passing Down Traditions and Culture
Painting skills of the Jelekong community have cultural values that need to be inherited to be passed on or communicated to the next generation through a self-taught practical art education process, given that culture is a learning process, not biologically inherited.One form of cultural inheritance to the next generation can be done through art education for generations.In education, learning to paint is seen as a means to achieve educational go…
Humanity Ground Zero
Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps—white male politicians and military heroes—was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this i…
The Eagle, the Rocket, and the Moon
In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new c…
The Magnificent Boat
Sounding, Historically, Anthropology's Current Crisis
Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis Richard Handler A. Elisabeth Reichel. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 430 pp. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s meticulously researched and relentlessly argued study is one among several publications resulting from a collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Sc…
Making the Scene and the Making of a Scene
New Orleans has long provided visitors with scenes for the pursuit of what Erving Goffman called "action"-out-of-the-ordinary experiences through which authenticity can be achieved. The founders of the Loose Marbles band came to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to make music at the scene where jazz was born. Their activities created a new scene on Royal Street in New Orleans. With growing success, the Marbles became absorbed into the local mus…
In Search of the Folk Society
Québécois nationalist ideologies base the uniqueness of Québécois identity on distinctive cultural traditions which, they urge, need to be protected. Among other cultural specialists, folklorists have worked to document traditional Québécois culture. But such research 'objectifies' traditional culture by placing it in new settings and attaching new meanings to it. And folklorists, as traditional in Québec as 'tradition' itself, thereby change the…
Divine order and secular social science in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America can be read as an extended anthropological comparison of hierarchical and egalitarian societies (‘aristocracies’ and ‘democracies,’ in his terms). In its use of comparative method, it is strikingly modern, almost post-modern: secular social science. And yet, for Tocqueville, divine knowledge provided another comparative perspective. In this essay, I explore the implications of Tocqueville’s considerati…
S tocking, G eorge W . (1928–2013)
George W. Stocking Jr. was an intellectual historian whose work on the history of North American and British anthropology gave anthropologists new ways to understand the theoretical foundations of their discipline during the last third of the twentieth century, a time of crisis (conceptual, methodological, and political) in the discipline
After authenticity at an American heritage site
This chapter explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity"—where the pursuit of an elusive authenticity remains a goal even as it generates public statements intended to call into question the epistemology of authenticity. It suggests that the vernacular concept of authenticity changes very little, that it shows a remarkable resilience, in a sense, because it is under threat. The chapter examines how Colonial Williamsburg tries to…
Vigueur au masculin, aspirations au féminin. Poésie, personnalité et culture chez Edward Sapir et Ruth Benedict
Resume :L’article original, « Vigorous Male and Aspiring Female. Poetry, Personality, and Culture in Edward Sapir », est paru dans Stocking, Jr, George W., Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others : Essays on Culture and Personality, p. 127-155, © 1987 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Réimpression autorisée par The University of Wisconsin Press
Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors
Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors Richard Handler Margaret M. Bruchac, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 280 pp. They've got a lot of stuff there, but they don't know much about it. Staff member at a Kwagiulth tribal center, referring to the University of British Columbia Anthropology Museum (as quoted in Clifford 1997:122) Margaret…
Tradition, Genuine or Spurious
Toward a New National Iconography
This study of fourteen US postage stamps between 1863 and 1922 analyzes images of American Indians in US national iconography. Beginning with a generic image of a native warrior that was rejected by the post office at a time when the Indian wars were still ongoing and ending with a portrait of an important Lakota leader incorporated into a 1922 stamp series, we show how the changing relationship of Native Americans to the US government was reflec…
Joseph Mitchell—with Variations
Joseph Mitchell—with Variations Richard Handler "Man—with Variations": Interviews with Franz Boas and Colleagues, 1937. Joseph Mitchell, Robert Brightman, ed. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press and University of Chicago Press, 2017. 75 pp. This 75-page Prickly Paradigm Press offering is perhaps the most intertextual text I have ever been challenged to review—which is to say, there are more voices per line of text here than an adventurous anthropolog…
Voicing the ancestors II
This is the second Forum in which anthropologists give voice to a disciplinary ancestral figure of their choice. The goal is to bring to our attention the wisdom of anthropologists who were prominent at one time in the history of our discipline but whose work has fallen out of fashion or perhaps simply been buried beneath the accumulated scholarly production of their successors. Listening to these voices reminds us that however much scholarly fas…
Found in translation
This review considers new work on translation, cultural interpretation, and cross-cultural comparison, all three terms suggesting different but related approaches to the central problem of sociocultural anthropology, that of understanding human meaning-making. Translating Worlds brings together ten authors who take language translation as a paradigmatic example of cultural translation within and across different kinds of linguistic and social bou…
Between engagement and critique
This paper describes the development of an undergraduate development studies program at the University of Virginia over the past decade. The author collaborative represents three generations of program participants: the founding director, a senior professor; a professor-of-the-practice, a younger faculty member hired from the development world; and three fourth-year undergraduate students. We focus on the tension the program navigates between eng…
Mining the time-space matrix
This article examines turn-of-the-twentieth-century US world's fairs and the postage stamps that were issued in their honor. The fairs celebrated the progress of industrial civilization, in part by anchoring themselves to a historical origin point (such as Columbus' voyages), and the post office designed the accompanying stamps to commemorate a historical story deemed to be nationally significant. Both the origin point and the history associated …
Voicing the ancestors
In this Forum, four anthropologists have chosen an "ancestral" figure to give voice to. Anthropologists' ancestors are generally teachers, mentors, or, less proximally, canonized scholars of prior generations. Anthropologists draw on their ancestors for theoretical wisdom and practical guidance. Yet ancestors are not always shared broadly across our discipline, and they can easily fall into oblivion. Giving voice to them, publicly, allows each co…
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation
In contemporary usage, the terms cultural heritage and cultural patrimony are synonyms. Both are metaphors that depict the idea that the culture (material and immaterial) of a specific social group is its property, owned collectively and passed on from one generation to the next. In the past 50 years, these terms have come to constitute a discursive space in which academic disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, and philosophy…
Authenticity, Anthropology of
Between History and Coincidence
Tradition, Genuine or Spurious
LIKE MANY SCHOLARLY CONCEPTS, is at once a commonsense and a scientific category. In its commonsense meaning, tradition refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs. In the social sciences, an ongoing discourse has attempted to refine this understanding of tradition as it has proven empirically and theoretically inadequate. Recent efforts to clarify the concept of tradition, most notably those of Edward Shils (1971, 1981), do much to add nu…
Authenticity
Dyssimulation
After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site
SThis essay explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity." The site is Colonial Williamsburg, one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever undertaken and a place intended to be experienced as an objective correlate of an American national "identity." Because it makes such claims, throughout its history the site has been subject to critiques by those wishing to undermine its authority to speak as the voice of an all-encom…
On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis
Recent proposals for 'dialogic' narrative ask anthropologists not merely to include the voices of others in their ethnographic narratives, but explicitly to share 'ethnographic authority' with them. Yet such a strategy may not be well suited for narrations about realities one wants to explore critically. For example, the analysis of nationalist politics reveals a set of basic presuppositions about the nature of culture that most anthropologists s…
On Sociocultural Discontinuity
M. Estellie Smith has recently attacked the concepts "tradition" and "change" as reifications which mislead us in our study of sociocultural process. She favors "sociocultural continuity" as an analytic construct that focuses attention on the interconnected processes of continuous change and persistent collective identity that characterize all human sociocultures. This approach suffers, however, from reification analogous to that it rejects, for …
On the Uses of Relativism
At Colonial Williamsburg, the idea that histories are interpretations that change in relation to changing social circumstances competes with a notion of history as "just the facts." The first approach, historical relativism, is more frequently enunciated in presentations of African-American history than in presentations of the history of the founding fathers. The museum thus asserts that black history is "conjectural," but it continues to present…
An Interview with Clifford Geertz
This interview with Clifford Geertz, conducted by Richard Handler, explores Geertz's intellectual trajectory and the development of his influential approach to interpretive anthropology. They discuss the relationship between anthropology and history, the role of theory in ethnographic research, the challenges of writing culture, and the impact of postmodernism on the discipline. Geertz reflects on his fieldwork experiences in Indonesia and Morocc…
One Discipline, Four Ways
One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 406 pp
Out in the Field
Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap. eds. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1996.315 pp
Writing Within
The Uses of Incommensurability in Anthropology
In common usage, the verb has two distinct meanings: on the one hand, to liken, to describe as similar; on the other hand, to note similarities and differences. When speakers have the first mean ing in mind, they can assert that because two phenomena are different, they be (apples and oranges, as we say). Such usage shades into a related one that has explicit evaluative overtones: people say that two phenomena cannot be compared when they mean to…
U.S. multiculturalism and the concept of culture
U.S. multiculturalism often relies upon a hegemonic and essentializing conception of culture. This culture concept separates the study of the familiar from the study of the exotic; represents diversity as a set of discrete and homogeneous units ("cultures"); divides and allots history to living persons on the basis of contemporary identities; conflates culture and race; and obscures the mutual shaping of racial distinctions and class relations. A…
Cultural Property and Culture Theory
Recent work in culture theory has mounted a decisive critique of the reifying tendencies that have been inherent in anthropologists' use of the culture concept. At the same time, cultural-property legislation has proliferated around the globe, leading, ironically, to a bureaucratic celebration of precisely those aspects of culture theory that many anthropologists now mistrust. This article reviews some of the reifying assumptions built in to the …
Worldly Provincialism
Objects of Culture
Public History, Private Memory
Colonial Williamsburg, and U.S. history museums generally, claim to transform public history into collective memory. That is, they convey an objective documented history to the public who, absorbing that history, acquires an appropriate collective or national memory. We argue that the emphasis on consumer (visitor) experience at such museums collapses the distance between the reconstructed past (the museum's history lesson) and the visitor's tour…
Anthropology Is Dead! Long Live Anthropology
Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds. New York: Routledge, 1992. 798 pp
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture
Anti-Romantic Romanticism
The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums
Journal Article The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums Get access Eric Gable, Eric Gable associate professor of anthropology University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Richard Handler Richard Handler visiting assistant professor of anthropology Sweet Briar College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81…
Heritage and Hegemony
Museum Culture
Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. Edited by Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. xx. 301 pp.; halftones, notes, index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)
Disciplinary Adaptation and Undergraduate Desire
Like most disciplinary scholars, anthropologists have been reluctant to reorganize their undergraduate programs to speak directly to student concerns. Yet, students are oriented, both intellectually and proto-professionally, to issues like global development, about which anthropologists have much to teach. This article examines student assumptions about development and about the interdisciplinary knowledge they think they need to understand it. I…
Afterword
All humans face the same epistemological dilemma: They must rely on an inherently limited-albeit life-giving-frame of reference to understand a world (which includes other people and cultures) that can never be completely understood in humanly particular terms. Given our common lot, anthropologists and "Natives," and outsiders and insiders, are never absolutely different, for difference is a matter of degree. Further more, the reality of differen…
Everyman's Heritage-An Album of Canadian Folk Life. Text by Magnus Einarsson
Audiovisual Books
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and the Growth of American Anthropology
Review Essay/Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and the Growth of American Anthropology Get access Richard Handler Richard Handler assistant professor of sociology and anthropology Lake Forest College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 71, Issue 2, September 1984, Pages 364–368, https://doi.org/10.2307/1901760 Published: 01 September 1984
Freud and Anthropology
Details of the spoken word; Ethnics and Epistemology in the Social Sciences; Passion and Politics
Dennis Tedlock The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyslvania Press. 1983. xi. 365 pp. $35.00 (cloth) Norma Haan. Robert N. Bellah. Paul Rabinow. William M. Sullivan. eds. Social Science as Moral Inquiry. New York: Columbia University Press. 1983. xiv. 392 pp. $40.00 (cloth), $12.00 (paper). F. G. Bailey The Tactical Uses of Passion. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1983. 275 pp. $29.50 (clot…
On Sociocultural Discontinuity
M. Estellie Smith has recently attacked the concepts "tradition" and "change" as reifications which mislead us in our study of sociocultural process. She favors "sociocultural continuity" as an analytic construct that focuses attention on the interconnected processes of continuous change and persistent collective identity that characterize all human sociocultures. This approach suffers, however, from reification analogous to that it rejects, for …
Narrating Multiple Realities
Tradition, Genuine or Spurious
LIKE MANY SCHOLARLY CONCEPTS, is at once a commonsense and a scientific category. In its commonsense meaning, tradition refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs. In the social sciences, an ongoing discourse has attempted to refine this understanding of tradition as it has proven empirically and theoretically inadequate. Recent efforts to clarify the concept of tradition, most notably those of Edward Shils (1971, 1981), do much to add nu…
One Fairy Story Too Many
General/Theoretical
Sapir's Poetic Experience
On Nationalism and Cultural Objectification
Canadian Content and the Nationalism of Applebaum-Hebert
Historical Narrative and Comparative Hermeneutics
Hierarchies of Choice
This analysis of hierarchy in the world interpreted by Jane Austen focuses on cultural principles and actors' pragmatic use of them. Austen's most highly ranked individuals are those "naturally" most "independent": the male heads of landed families, who can make choices without deference to others. However, those who are independent have dependents-and depend on them to be able to express their own high status. Austen's novels exploit the irony o…
General/Theoretical Anthropology
On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis
Recent proposals for 'dialogic' narrative ask anthropologists not merely to include the voices of others in their ethnographic narratives, but explicitly to share 'ethnographic authority' with them. Yet such a strategy may not be well suited for narrations about realities one wants to explore critically. For example, the analysis of nationalist politics reveals a set of basic presuppositions about the nature of culture that most anthropologists s…
Anthropology as Cultural Critique
Children's Literature in Hitler's Germany
Of Cannibals and Custom
The author teaches at the department of anthropology, University of Virginia. In the course of teaching both cultural anthropology and the history of anthropology, I have found the essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) useful for three tasks: first, to introduce the idea of cultural relativism; second, to suggest the historical depth of the concept in Western thought; and third, to sketch its problematic relationship (in Montaigne's time as wel…
Authenticity
Culture and Class in Anthropology and History
Journal Article Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration. By Gerald M. Sider. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xii + 205 pp. $34.50.) Get access Richard Handler Richard Handler University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1011–1012, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904072 Published: 01 March …
Narrative Psychology
The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival
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