The Raymond D. Fogelson Papers

Raymond D. Fogelson was a luminary theoretician in the interdisciplinary field of ethnohistory who advocated for Indigenous-centered theory and ethnographic writing in the field of Cherokee studies and ethnohistory. Fogelson’s unique methodology was to look for institutions that Cherokees and Native peoples themselves considered traditional and to carefully study them.

Fogelson taught in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago and trained leading ethnohistorians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Dedicated to his graduate students, the corpus of his influential scholarship resides in journal articles, academic presentations, and public lectures. In this essential collection, Sergei Kan and Michael E. Harkin have assembled Fogelson’s pioneering articles as a resource for ethnohistorians in the twenty-first century.  

Author Biography

Raymond D. Fogelson (1933–2020) was coeditor of The Anthropology of Power: Ethnographic Studies from Asia, Oceania, and New World and author of The Cherokees: A Critical Bibliography. Sergei Kan is a professor of anthropology and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including A Maverick Boasian: The Life and Work of Alexander A. Goldenweiser (Nebraska, 2023). Michael E. Harkin is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming–Laramie. He is the author of several books, including Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands (Bison Books, 2007).