It was established after a rearrangement of various sections of the Anthropological Society, which was formed in 1873 by Hjalmar Stolpe, Hans Hildebrand, Oscar Montelius, and Gustaf Retzius.

In the intervening years, the society has awarded the Anders Retzius Medal to a geographer or anthropologist.

[2] In 2015, the Society decided that awarding a medal named after Retzius was inappropriate; his racial studies—including a collection of skulls of indigenous peoples—are viewed with disapproval by modern anthropologists.

The society's awards are handed out by the King of Sweden on 24 April, the anniversary of Nordenskiöld's return to Stockholm.

The following people are among the recipients of the society's awards:[4] Kritisk Etnografi (Swedish for "critical ethnography"), subtitled Swedish Journal of Anthropology, is a bi-annual peer-reviewed, open-access, online-only, academic journal on the subjects of anthropology and ethnography, owned and published by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in collaboration with DiVA, an online archive maintained by Uppsala University.