I am extremely happy to announce today that I’m making open access my timeline of the history of anthropological theory. This timeline has over 1,000 entries, beginning with the birth of Lewis Henry Morgan on 21 Nov 1818 and the latest is the death of Roy D’Andrade on 20 Oct 2016. It includes details from the careers of roughly 118 anthropologists from England, France, and the United States. It is designed to be viewed in Aeon Timeline, but I’ve also provided a dump of the data so you can play with it however you like.

History of Anthropology Timeline (98K .zip file on google drive)

I started this timeline five or six years ago, when I first started teaching history of theory courses. I felt that there was a tremendous gap between the stories told in theory courses, what history of anthropology as a speciality revealed about the history of the discipline, and the standard average potted history of the discipline ensconced in the heads of anthropology professors. Rather than teach the standard narrative that I had received from my teachers, I wanted to figure out what really happened.

This eventually grew into a book project that I’ll publish one day down the road… long down the road… but to prevent myself from going insane I’ve given the project some very basic parameters. First, I am focusing on French, English, and American anthropology (mostly American at this point ). Second, this is a timeline of sociocultural anthropology. Sorry I know that excludes a lot. Third, I am defining ‘anthropology’ here as the modern discipline which institutionalized in the 1920s. So there is a chronological restriction. Finally, I tried to locate people who seemed most institutionally and intellectually central, as well as people that I was just personally interested in. So your favorite people will definitely not be on there. In general I’ve tried to recover the people who were important to the discipline but who were erased (particularly in the US) during the great WASP Scientization of the discipline in the 1950s, or who just plain never made it in their in the first place. In sum, I’ve had national, temporal, and intellectual limits to this project to keep from going crazy, but I’m sure you will be outraged at my omission of your favorite person. But just let me know who you think should be in here and I (or you) can add them.

At this point the timeline is too too rich in dates to actually just look at. You pretty much need to filter it to decide what you want to see. This is a work in progress designed for my use, not an outward facing, user-friendly tool. But I still think it will be helpful for many people. Hopefully you think it’s useful! I’ll keep updating as I continue to work on this project.

I’ve personally always been fascinated by the history of anthropology, and how telling stories about our past enables or disables certain futures for our discipline. At some point about ten years ago, I began a history of anthropology timeline and blogged about it on Savage Minds. I kept working on it, and did another post in 2010.

Since then my timeline has grown and now contains over 600 events! And in the course of doing this work, I’ve shifted between different software. After a decade of looking for Mac software to create timelines, I’ve found — and stuck with — Aeon Timeline.

Partially, Aeon Timeline is the best because there are few competitors — especially for Mac. But even if there were, I think Aeon Timeline would be head and shoulders above the competition. The program was written with fiction authors in mind, so it’s incredibly customizable. Vernor Vinge could create a timeline using the decimal timekeeping system he uses in some of his books, if he wanted to. You can create people, institutions, or other entities and then link timeline entries to them. You can add tags to events. You can filter events to visualize your timeline in different ways. All of this was very important to me, since with 600 entries you can’t really look at the raw timeline anymore, you can only pull particular ways of visualizing it. And to be honest, I haven’t even used the full power of this timeline.

Aeon Timeline does have some downsides. It is a bit harder than it needs to be to get data into it. If you are a novice user, all of the entities, arcs, metadata, other forms might be intimidating. It can be difficult to just get the thing to zoom in to exactly what time period yo want to go. But these are minor issues. Overall, the program is a lot of fun to use, especially once the data are in there and you can start playing around with them. Who knew that Malinowski and American Anthropologist were born in the same year? Visualization allows you to explore relationships in your data you wouldn’t otherwise see, and timelines are no exception to this fact.

Aeon Timeline is also definitely indie. As far as I can tell it is designed, written, and owned by one guy. So you don’t feel like you’re supporting a faceless megacorp when you buy it. In fact, since I believe in supporting independent software developers, I don’t feel at all guilty using this space to push his product. With the release of Aeon Timeline 2 this month, he is offering a 50% discount on the product, so you can get a great timeline program for only US$25.

So if you are interested in experimenting with timeline software, I’d recommend Aeon Timeline 2. And hey, if you do buy a copy are are interested in the history of anthropology, shoot me an email — I’ll throw in a free timeline into the deal for you as well.