Article begins
The 2026 call for pitches from Anthropology News for “Defunded” work must feel painfully appropriate to many. For me, it felt serendipitous as well. In July of 2025, I gently launched a website for a project entitled “Anthropology’s Lost Library.” This website marked the initial step in an admittedly audacious undertaking: an archive of anthropology’s unfinished and unpublished works—particularly its academic and popular writings, articles, books, and grant proposals. In this short essay, I seek both to outline the mission for the Lost Library and to create an opportunity for interested readers to envision how they might contribute to the project of developing it.
“Anthropology’s Lost Library” began appropriately enough, as a grant proposal that went unfunded. In 2018, I wrote a proposal for a project in which I would build a network of contingently employed anthropologists in the United States and travel across the country to meet and interview them to learn more about their unfinished work—articles never submitted, book projects never completed, conference papers outlined but never presented. As a contingent faculty member myself, I had found it difficult to realize my research projects and I expected that my experience was far from unique. With colleagues I knew teaching upwards of eight sections per year and having little time to write or think, facing dismal job prospects and a constant barrage of applications, and lacking many of the institutional supports (sabbaticals, conference travel funds, internal grants, physical and virtual spaces for the storage of data) that facilitate a flourishing research and publishing agenda, it seemed highly likely to me that I would find that there were many projects not completed and writings unfinished in our discipline. Importantly, too, it seemed that the effacement of these works might have more to do with the dominant political economy of academic labor than with their argumentation, novelty, ethics and politics, or theoretical sophistication.
The project lingered on, even without grant support. If anything, time made its focus broader. Not only has the reliance on contingently employed academics not decreased in the years since 2018, but the COVID-19 pandemic also made palpably and horrifically clear that anthropological research can be stymied for many other reasons as well. Almost all of the anthropologists I know, particularly those at the graduate level, felt their research trajectories shift dramatically as a result of a range of pandemic-associated factors: geopolitical fear-mongering and travel restrictions, illnesses of their own and illnesses and losses among family and other loved ones, new ethical and political constraints placed on in-person fieldwork, and more. The long view of the discipline is, in my estimation, likely to show a pair of fully explicable large-scale shifts in focus as a result of the pandemic: on the one hand, toward digital- and archive-sited projects and, on the other, towards projects located in the researcher’s own immediate geographical “bubble.” That said, though, a crucial set of questions will be easy to overlook in the identification of, and reckoning with, those shifts: What of those abandoned projects, the projects that were deemed infeasible and unfundable as a result of COVID-19? What becomes of that work? What, furthermore, becomes of the work produced by students and faculty who abandoned their projects because of matters of illness or commitments of care? Again, among the many crucial issues these questions highlighted for me was that this work was not abandoned because it failed to meet standards of anthropological rigor or merit (standards which are themselves, of course, not above question and critique) but because of the exigencies of circumstance—the very exigencies, we could also note, that anthropologists invest so much time and attention to understanding in the worlds of others.
I see this Lost Library, then, as addressing issues that are core to the discipline and to its past and present political formations. It seeks to attend, particularly, to the lifeworld of the researcher—something that minoritized researchers have long identified as systematically deprioritized in the annals of the discipline. I presented the Lost Library at a poster session at the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting and the stories people told me of lost work—whether theirs or that of friends and colleagues—resonated deeply with me. I met senior scholars who were nearing retirement and realizing that there were essays they would never finish, recent graduates who were looking for work outside of academic anthropology and were preparing to leave some drafted articles behind, and scholars of all levels of seniority who spoke of formative traumatic experiences that dramatically shaped their research and their writing. Researchers told me of giving up on projects because they did not receive grants and because their loved ones grew ill, but they also mentioned abandoning projects because they faced danger in their fieldsites. They gave up on dissertation topics because they found themselves working with an abusive advisor and chose to start from scratch on another project, with a new mentor, rather than to face more harm in the service of work already completed. They gave up academic writing because they felt drawn, through the deep affective and interpersonal bonds of fieldwork, to urgent activist engagements.
These conversations cemented for me the importance of the Lost Library project. If readers of this essay are willing to allow that the work of anthropology is fundamentally intertwined with the subjectivity of the researcher and the worlds that researcher inhabits, then it feels similarly appropriate to identify the ways that work not completed is also intertwined with researcher subjectivity and context. It is for this reason that I believe the best version of this repository will serve not only as a home for incomplete scholarly writings—the fieldwork stories nearly lost, the theories partially conceived—but also as a tool for the development of theory about the broader contexts shaping the production of anthropological research. A stable, well-curated, and easily searchable Lost Library has the potential to speak to the politics of the discipline as a whole.
A question I have received from colleagues in other disciplines is: “Why must this be Anthropology’s Lost Library, why not Academia’s Lost Library?” Setting aside the fact that “Anthropology’s Lost Library” is already a tremendous undertaking, I tend to respond by saying that anthropology as a discipline is particularly invested in the significance of lifeworlds and in stories and experiences that might otherwise be regarded as minor or irrelevant. It is in the spirit of these investments that the Lost Library is undertaken. Other anthropological archives—focusing particularly on the preservation of the physical and digital materials that anthropologists produce during fieldwork (maps, interview transcripts, field notes, and photographs)—are undoubtedly animated by these investments too. However, there seems as yet to be no archival collection of “revise and resubmit” articles that never made it to print, op-eds that were never published, grant proposals that were rejected, and essays that stop mid-sentence. It is for these reasons that “Anthropology’s Lost Library” will focus specifically on the preservation of incomplete and unpublished works. Because those incomplete and unpublished works are accompanied invariably by stories of their writing, it is also part of the vision for the Lost Library to collect accounts (in the form of autobiographical narratives and interviews) of the lived conditions and personal decisions that led to works being unfinished. If it proves feasible, some of those accounts may appear here, in future editions of Anthropology News.
Despite its narrower focus, the management of “Anthropology’s Lost Library” promises to pose some incredible challenges. First among those challenges is the work of making the archive stable, sustainable, and searchable. It is somewhat fitting, given the impetus for the Lost Library, that the library itself is presently taking shape “between academic institutions.” Without a home in a college or university that can provide back-end support, matters of infrastructure, funding, and labor will be paramount. Another challenge that might be less immediately obvious will be the collection of materials. It is an open question whether anthropologists will be willing to place their unfinished work in a searchable archive, in the service of this sort of intellectual endeavor. A third challenge concerns the organization and regulation of the Lost Library. How does one curate a collection of lost work without generating, as a result of those very practices of curation, further libraries that are doubly lost, doubly effaced? Significant though these challenges might be, they are not insurmountable. They do not constitute reasons that this project should not be undertaken at all.
Given the evident audacity and challenge of this project, I conclude this essay with a broad invitation for engagement. At this stage of the Lost Library’s development, any expertise is valuable. If you have contributions and stories to share, if you know of other relevant archives or have experience building archives, or if you are simply interested in learning more about this project as it takes shape, your perspectives and experiences are welcome. The website for “Anthropology’s Lost Library” is lost-library.net. While the site is quite rudimentary at this stage, interested readers are encouraged to visit the site, complete the web form, submit work, and join the growing collection of researchers who are already contributing to the preservation of anthropology’s unfinished writings.