More about the library
ALL is guided by the following questions:
What becomes of lost ideas and unfinished work? Where do they reside and how do they shape what comes after them?
What causes an idea or work to become “lost” and how, if at all, do those causes intersect with wider political economies of academic labor in the 20th and 21st centuries?
Do 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 these texts when they are preserved and catalogued?
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, grants never funded, dissertations abandoned, conference papers never ultimately published.
Anthropology’s Lost Library, which was launched in the summer of 2025, is committed to collecting these absent works and, in doing so, to building a searchable database that showcases the stories they tell.
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 consideration of the effects of power and paradigm suggests that this is unlikely to be true in all—or even most—cases.
As a repository for lost and abandoned writing projects, Anthropology’s Lost Library will offer a virtual home for the casualties of intellectual circumstance in anthropology.
It will also serve as a record of the reasons why projects become lost and, as such, a resource for those interested in learning more about the politics of intellectual labor in the discipline of anthropology as well as the ethical and social relationships that define/d the discipline and its domains of concern.
“Anthropology’s Lost Library is committed to collecting these absent works and building a searchable database that showcases the stories they tell. ”