Talk:Bibliography of anthropology

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What is the purpose of this list?[edit]

I'm struggling to understand why this list exists. I can see the need for a general Bibliography of anthropology but, since that hasn't been created yet, why create this subset of "important" publications?

In any case, I'm extremely sceptical that it's possible to have consistent conclusion critera for a list like this. How on earth can one decide on an even slightly objective definition of "important"? The lead makes a stab of it, listing "influence", "breakthroughs" and "topic creator". But it's a rare academic publication that doesn't either open up new areas of research, present new scientific knowledge, or exert an influence on later scholarship, those things being the very reason they exist. So all the criteria hinge on this word "significantly", but there's no mention of how you demonstrate significance. Sources that state as much, I assume, that being the only thing conforming to WP:V. But there aren't any such sources in the article and again you'll seldom find a positive (or even a negative) review of a publication that doesn't concede the work has some merit and influence. The works in the list at the moment are extremely eclectic, especially in the non-sociocultural sections: there are introductory textbooks, seemingly randomly chosen edited volumes, and one work that hasn't even been published yet!

I notice that at least one similar list in the see also, List of important publications in biology has already been merged into Bibliography of biology on these grounds. I'm strongly inclined to suggest we do the same with this list, widening its scope to include any work whether it's 'important' or not, unless someone can drastically improve the sourcing and the clarity of the inclusion criteria. joe•roet•c 17:40, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I have to agree; I don't see how the inclusion criteria can be anything other than subjective. People will naturally and honestly disagree about, for example, what constitutes a significantly new topic or which work(s) created that topic. There may be a few unambiguously "important" publications (though given the sincere but sometimes heated disagreement I have seen among anthropologists, even that is not certain), but there will always be some level of disagreement about where to draw the cut-off line.
I'm also less sanguine than Joe Roe about the prospects for creating Bibliography of anthropology on two bases. First (and less problematic), how do we determine which anthropology publications are notable? Is it the list of all books that satisfy Wikipedia:Notability (books)? What about journal articles or dissertations? Second, although it may seem a trivial question I foresee serious problems in deciding what counts as an anthropology publication. For example, Guns, Germs, and Steel purports to be a work of ethnology, but many anthropologists point to Jared Diamond's academic affiliations and the book's methodological divergence from the mainstream of ethnology to suggest that the book is not a work of anthropology. On the other hand, Readings in the Sociology of Language purports to be a work of sociology, yet the book has had important effects on Linguistic anthropology, and it's author, Joshua Fishman, is a notable ethnographer of multilingual communities. Then we get to the long list of books, such as Growing Up Bilingual, that do not clearly position themselves in anthropology, sociology, or linguistics, but are claimed by all three fields. Cnilep (talk) 02:41, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • We could have a list of anthropology journals, where the inclusion criterion would be anthropology journals that have articles. For books we could set a standard of having received one of the major anthropology book awards.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 13:53, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What to do, then? I don't think Maunus' suggestion is bad, but it would need consensus to maintain, and given that the main contributor to this list seems to be ignoring this discussion (instead now adding science fiction books!), that's kind of awkward. AfD? joe•roet•c 20:33, 29 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Another way not to lose the work Anthrophilos has put into this would be to store it in WP:ANTHROPOLOGY as a combined bibliography for use in anthropology related articles and a list of articles for creation.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:26, 29 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This article could use some improvement, but I don't see any pressing need to move it (or put it through the AfD process). The list as it stands is useful -- it orients newcomers to anthropology by providing some landmarks, which is a natural extension of the "Further Reading" lists on Wikipedia and other reference works -- and the contents are not all obviously wrong or trivial. I wouldn't object to turning it into a Bibliography of anthropology, but I agree with Cnilep that it wouldn't resolve the problem, since we'd still need to establish inclusion criteria. That said, if the list does get turned into a bibliography, please note that WikiProject Bibliographies has done a lot of work on this issue; there are plenty of good ideas about inclusion criteria on that project page.

As for the specific concerns with this list, I think a publication would reasonably qualify if it is described as important, influential, a "major work," etc., in standard introductory anthropology texts, or is heavily cited in the anthropological literature. Maunus' suggestion of anthropology books awards isn't bad, either. It should be easy to satisfy these criteria for obvious candidates like Boas, Frazer, Malinowski, or Levi-Strauss, and I think it would be a reasonable way to decide whether anthropologists consider a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel to be important in their field. After some work has been done to provide citations, unreferenced entries could be removed. For edge cases, this Talk page is available for discussion about whether a particular work qualifies. Jd4v15 (talk) 02:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My experience working on several bibliographies is that it is best to find the sources that establish notability of this list per WP:LISTN - that is, reliable sources that include bibliographies of anthropology - and then use them to help you decide what criteria are appropriate. RockMagnetist (talk) 06:55, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Consensus is clear that "Bibliography of anthropology", however whether that changes the inclusion criteria is not clear and should be discussed further. It's worth noting that the change of title does mandate that the inclusion criteria change. It would also be appreciated if someone could rewrite the lead sentence now that it's been moved. Jenks24 (talk) 12:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]


List of important publications in anthropology → Bibliography of anthropology – Per discussion above, a more general title would avoid subjective decisions about importance and allow broader content. This would require some changes to inclusion criteria and a minor rewrite of the lead section. Cnilep (talk) 02:50, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support as requester and per my remarks in "What is the purpose of this list?" above. Cnilep (talk) 02:50, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • supportcomment I don't think we have that kind of article - its just not encyclopedic. I think this needs to be placed in wikiproject space.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:19, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • There are actually a lot of bibliographies in the main article space. According to the WP:BIB page, "there are 725 articles within the scope of WikiProject Bibliographies, of which 10 are featured." That page also includes a lot of examples. Jd4v15 (talk) 03:56, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I stand corrected.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 04:03, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Are you guys thinking of making significant contributions to justify the move to a much larger "bibliography of anthropology"? If it is simply a matter of (or confusion over) inclusion criteria, I do not see sufficient reasons to justify a move. The other disciplines and their "lists of important publications" seem to be doing just fine. Anthrophilos (talk) 22:17, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:Anthrophilos, this is a new article list of important publications in science series. I nominatednomintated those articles for deletion years ago. Unless lists of important publications are discussed elsewhere, it would be subjective for anyone to include such a list on wiki per WP:N.Curb Chain (talk) 22:45, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd rather send this article through WP:AfD to better establish its legitimate existence here on wikipedia.Curb Chain (talk) 22:50, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am loath to suggest a quantitative measure for such a qualitative discipline, but one measure of a book's impact on the discipline is the number of times it has been cited. This does tend to favour some (but not all) older books, but it is a figure easily derived from Google scholar. It would take some of the subjective factor out of the selection of "importance."Schrauwers (talk) 23:14, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Anthrophilos asked me to comment here because I contributed the entry called List of important publications in psychology. My view is the following (I developed this view without reading the earlier views expressed in the paragraphs above; I read the above paragraphs only after writing this). In these social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics, there are Wikipedia entries entitled "List of important publications in ...." Sociology is different. In sociology, one finds Bibliography of sociology. Political science has neither. I think there is an advantage to having some uniformity in the social sciences.

I decided to look at the physical and natural sciences. They are divided too. Most (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology) have entries such as "List of important publications in...." Important publications in biology, however, were entered as "Bibliography...." Astronomy had no publications entry.

It is not that I believe that the majority is always right. I think, however, that because we are contributing to an encyclopedia, we ought to have a certain amount of uniformity in how we present information. The "List of important important publications in...." has developed organically over time. There is a degree of uniformity already in the form of the "List of important publications in ...." I therefore endorse the position that we maintain List of important publications in anthropology as it is and NOT create an entry called "Bibliography of anthropology."Iss246 (talk) 03:41, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support - not only do the list naming guidelines frown on words like "important" in the title (as BDD pointed out), but the previous sentence answers many of the above concerns: "the precise inclusion criterion of the list should be spelled out in the lead section (see below), not the title." See the discussion on topical bibliographies in WikiProject Bibliographies for how to provide inclusion criteria. RockMagnetist (talk) 05:59, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lede[edit]

I've made an attempt to rewrite the lede per the closer of the move discussion.Curb Chain (talk) 13:28, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I restored a reduced version of the third paragraph of the lead from the version of the page in order to give a bit more context for anthropology as a field. Feel free to change it as necessary. Cnilep (talk) 01:41, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sources for descriptions[edit]

While I take Manus at his word that people do refer to "Literary anthropology (including Anthropological science fiction)" as a thing, I'd still like to see some sources for the description, and while we're at it, for those of Biological anthropology and Archaeological anthropology (aka Archaeology). The text doesn't seem particularly problematic, but it's not quite of a piece with "The sky is blue." Cnilep (talk) 00:10, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think this should clear it up [1]·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:13, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Selection criteria[edit]

Most of the article titles are redlinks. For now it seems more accurate to say that it is a list of publications by notable people, not notable publications. RockMagnetist (talk) 05:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think most (probably all) of them are notable enough to eventually have articles.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:19, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The number of redlinks seems excessive - it looks like an article creation guide. I'd recommend moving towards replacing a lot of them by black text with third-party citations to support notability. Also, there are a lot of entries in Category:Anthropology books that would improve the ratio of blue to red. RockMagnetist (talk) 18:44, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What about discredited book?[edit]

Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, 2000. Patrick Tierney's book was determined to be deliberately fraudulent.[1][2] Or is that a reason for it to be in the Bibliography of anthropology? Star767 (talk) 01:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  1. ^ "Preliminary report: The major allegations against Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel presented in Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney appear to be deliberately fraudulent" (PDF).
  2. ^ AAA Rescinds Acceptance of the El Dorado Report
It has its own article, so it is notable and therefore satisfies the selection criteria; however, it would be appropriate to add a note about the fraud. RockMagnetist (talk) 03:45, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing organization[edit]

It is confusing to have a set of chronological categories as well as subject categories - especially if the former are just for sociocultural anthropology. Probably there should be just one or the other. I think subjects would be the better choice, as the books would be arranged chronologically within each category anyway.

The organization of articles in Wikipedia is strongly in favor of separating social and cultural anthropology. Just look at the sidebar for this article, for example. Sociocultural anthropology is a sad little stub, just a dictionary definition, and has been that way since 2004. Finally, judging by hits on Google, the great majority people still separate the two. So a split would be a good idea. RockMagnetist (talk) 05:29, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you about the chronological and subject categories; only the latter should be necessary. I have no strong opinion on sociocultural anthropology versus separate social and cultural categories. Cnilep (talk) 07:40, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How would you split them? In my experience social and cultural anthropology are basically synonyms (British and American respectively), and people only make a distinction when they're deliberately emphasising the (obsolete) historical divergence. The reason "sociocultural anthropology" isn't used very often is simply because it's jargony and unnecessary if everyone understands they refer to the same thing. Joe Roe (talk) 21:33, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here my experience isn't worth much - I'm mainly interested in this page because I maintain scientific bibliographies in general. However, Wikipedians seem to draw a distinction, so it may be simpler to go with the existing consensus. If you think Social anthropology and Cultural anthropology should be merged, feel free to propose it - just don't say I sent you! RockMagnetist (talk) 00:24, 17 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If you look at Talk:Cultural anthropology there have been a few good proposals to merge them that have petered out for lack of interest rather than any argument for keeping them separate. Per WP:CONLIMITED, I don't see why we should be beholden to that rather weak consensus.
But to return to your original suggestion, I agree the current organisation is confusing. Splitting social and cultural anthropology wouldn't help much, because you'd then just have two categories based basically on whether the auther is American or European, and difficulty splitting them into further sections because since at least the 1970s most research agendas have bridged the divide.
Following the other bibliography of science articles, it's probably better to split by (sub-)subdiscipline rather than date. Cultural anthropologists are fond of coining new ... anthropologies to describe their work (ecological anthropology, economic anthropology, medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, political anthropology, anthropology of religion... etc. ad nauseum), so it should be relatively easy. Joe Roe (talk) 11:36, 17 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What qualifies as anthropology?[edit]

The structure of this list appears to have been drawn up on the assumption that any field of study that includes "anthropology" in its name is a subfield of anthropology. Well, they aren't. I already removed the branch of Christian theology called anthropology, but we still have:

  • 'Philosophical anthropology' – a branch of philosophy, not anthropology.
  • 'Linguistic anthropology (including linguistics and philosophy of language)' – linguistic anthropology refers very specifically to the tradition of studying 'language as culture' stemming from Boas [2], it doesn't include linguistics or philosophy of language, which are wholly distinct disciplines.
  • 'Literary anthropology (including anthropological science fiction)' – according to Maunus' source [3] literary anthropology has been coined to describe the tradition of cultural anthropology following Geertz 'literary turn', which is what the lead to that section now says, but it doesn't include works of fiction, which is what that section of the list actually contains .

I suggest we get rid of these sections, or possibly keep literary anthropology as a subsection of sociocultural anthropology (but we'd have to find something to put in it first). Anthropology is broad and unwieldy enough without us annexing other disciplines based on their use of the same Greek construction.

Also, I'll go ahead and rename the archaeology section archaeology... nobody says 'archaeological anthropology'. Joe Roe (talk) 22:07, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Since there hasn't been any objections in two weeks I'll go ahead and remove these sections. Joe Roe (talk) 00:52, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think Joe Roe was a bit hasty there, at least in the case of Linguistic anthropology. As Joe Roe allows, linguistic anthropology is part of the American four-field approach to the broader field. It is true that Noam Chomsky and others declared Linguistics to be a field independent of anthropology (or psychology), and many who have come after him have little to do with four-field anthropology. But some of the scholars removed, such as Edward Sapir, B.L. Whorf, and Dell Hymes are very much within the US tradition of anthropology. The question of what to do with scholars such as Herder and von Humboldt, who predate anthropology and linguistics as independent fields, or Ken Pike or RMW Dixon, who are arguably part of that post-Chomsky linguistics and yet speak to linguistic anthropology, is more controversial. But the bottom line for me is that at least some of the items removed are part of a definite tradition of linguistic anthropology as such. Cnilep (talk) 01:12, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was about to say the same.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:19, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Inclusion criteria[edit]

There has been some discussion of what the inclusion criteria should be since the move, but they haven't been spelled out. Following other bibliographies under the umbrella of WikiProject Bibliographies, I suggest that we only include works that:

  • Are included in a reliable bibliography of anthropology (e.g. [4]), or
  • Are identified as significant works of anthropology in multiple reliable sources, or
  • Are notable enough to have their own article, and are considered as works of anthropology (this should be cited if challenged)

The latter proviso is to avoid including works like Syntactic Structures or The Selfish Gene, which are highly notable but only tangentially related to anthropology. Joe Roe (talk) 12:13, 17 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Excessive internal links?[edit]

Generally speaking, an internal link should appear the first time a concept or person is mentioned, but not each time the same concept or individual is named thereafter. Exceptions are made, e.g. for tables or infoboxes, but the standard is "consider whether the added value of linking a particular occurrence outweighs the consequent dilution of the value of other links" (Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking). Personally, I find it excessive to have two, three, even four links to the same individual. It might be acceptable to link once from each major section (e.g. one link to Michael Tomasello under linguistic anthropology and one more under biological anthropology), but three links to Bronisław Malinowski within 15 lines of text seems ridiculous.

How should internal links be handled on this page? If it differs from the standard in the MOS, please offer justification for your suggestion. Cnilep (talk) 03:39, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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