More about the library

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.

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.

ALL is thus 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?

With these questions in mind, the only criteria (at present) for the inclusion of work in ALL are the following:

that the writing in question was undertaken with the goal of sharing it with broader academic and/or non-academic audiences (e.g. grant proposals or essays rather than raw fieldnotes or personal letters),
that the author/submitter confirms (when relevant) that the research was undertaken with approval from a relevant ethics body and that they have met the conditions of that approval in their writing,
that the author/submitter recognizes that submitted work may be removed from ALL if it is flagged as inappropriate for the archive and fails a subsequent review.

These criteria are provisional and subject to change.

Click here to learn more about our poster session at the 2025 American Anthropological Association conference in New Orleans.

What is coming next for ALL? Click here for more information.

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 writing projects (no matter how unfinished, no matter how small), 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.