Johannes Fabian (1937–2026) and the critique of anthropology

This brief essay memorializes Johannes Fabian and his contribution to Critique of Anthropology by reviewing his contribution to the journal and his conception of critique in anthropology. It highlights not just Fabian’s role in keeping the journal going after the untimely death of Bob Scholte in 1987, but also how they collaborated in producing a epistemological revolution in anthropology. While most anthropologists today would associate this with Fabian’s contribution to the “literary turn” in anthropology by his more famous Time and the Other (1983) I argue that the build-up to this book shows a currently neglected but far more fundamental and visionary conception of critique that centered on an epistemological critique arising from fieldwork praxis.