More about the library
This project began, appropriately enough, as a grant that went un-funded.
Anthropology has generated a vast and unruly compendium of texts that crisscrosses continents and disciplinary lines, but the field has also been shaped by absences: books never finished, fieldwork never completed, dissertations abandoned, conference papers never ultimately published.
Anthropology’s Lost Library, which was just launched in the summer of 2025, is committed to collecting these absent works and, in doing so, to creating the opportunity to see what stories they tell.
The Lost Library is thus guided by the following questions:
What becomes of lost ideas? Where do they reside and how do they shape what comes after them?
What causes an idea to be lost and how, if at all, do those causes intersect with wider political economies of academic labor in the 20th and 21st centuries?
Do the anthropology’s lost texts map the edges of any taken-for-granted orthodoxies? Are there non-canonical, yet exciting, paths-not-taken to be found in this texts when they are preserved and catalogued?
Ideas come too early or too late. Exhaustion sets in. Money and time run out. Mentors can be cruel or abusive. Geopolitical contexts change. Illnesses take their toll. Activist commitments grow urgent. Fieldwork becomes unsafe and fieldnotes get stolen. Family concerns arise. Prose comes in an undesired key. Teaching obligations overwhelm.
And on and on.
It might be the case that the texts that belong in this library are lost for good reason—Perhaps they were simply not good or interesting enough to be preserved. Perhaps they were harmful.
A brief consideration of the known effects of power and paradigm, though, suggest that this is unlikely to be true in all—or even most—cases.
As a repository for lost and abandoned ideas (no matter how unfinished, no matter how small), the Lost Library offers a virtual home for the casualties of intellectual circumstance in anthropology. Perhaps it will eventually also serve as a home to the conversations these lost and abandoned ideas spawn about the discipline, its methodologies, its politics, and the ethical and social relationships that define/d it and its domains of concern.
