Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger
Stephen Chrisomalis and Andre Costopoulos, editors
Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, which was published recently by the University of Toronto Press, is a book that Andre Costopoulos and I envisioned shortly after the death of our friend and mentor Bruce Trigger, who was my dissertation supervisor. In helping to sort through his papers, we became aware that he had developed, over several decades, a network of eclectic and important scholars, including many of his own students, whose work did not fit into conventional theoretical or disciplinary categories or whose serious ideas had not received adequate attention. We also were reminded of how unconventional much of Trigger’s own work was, with articles such as ‘Brecht and ethnohistory’ and ‘Akhenaten and Durkheim’ among his eclectic works. But the book was created not as a sterile memorial to Trigger, but rather, as a way to think about scholarship that is, “unfinished, unbegun, or even unthinkable, in the present intellectual climate”.
Human Expeditions is a decidedly ‘unfashionable’ book, and we are proud of that fact. We identified people whose work is poorly characterized by ‘isms’, and asked them to share work that filled gaps in present thinking. The contributors to the volume come from the philosophy of science, history, and Egyptology as well as anthropology and archaeology. The result, we hope, will give greater depth to anthropological insights and greater conceptual breadth to the humanistic social sciences. A number of contributors are very senior figures in their fields, but we believe it is just as critical to include contributions from early-stage scholars, including several who were students of Trigger in his final years. At minimum, we want to provide immediate venues for important scholarship that lies outside disciplinary norms. At its most utopian, Human Expeditions allows us to envision, “an alternate history of the social sciences in which conformity to convention is not an expectation,” and to think about different configurations of disciplines than those currently in fashion. We think that Trigger would have approved heartily.
Glossographia 