Description
Book Synopsis Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.
Trade Review “This volume, its contributing authors, and the fieldworkers and ethnographies they restore constitute a creative, necessary resistance to iconoclastic, postcolonial assaults on anthropology. Highly recommended.” • Choice
“This collection is an important event in the subfield of history of anthropology. Its editors, two well-known European scholars, have assembled an impressive collection of essays … It should be in the library of every major university.” • Andrew Lyons, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo
Table of Contents List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Unearthing the Hidden Treasures of Early Ethnography
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Introduction: . Other Argonauts: Chapters in the History of Pre-Malinowskian Ethnography
Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han F. Vermeulen
Part I: In Search of the Native’s Point of View
Chapter 1. “Adapt Fully to Their Customs”: Franz Boas as an Ethnographer among the Inuit of Baffinland (1883–84) and his Monograph The Central Eskimo (1888)
Herbert S. Lewis
Chapter 2. “A Sympathetic Chronicler of a Sympathetic People”: Katie Langloh Parker and The Euahlayi Tribe (1905)
Barbara Chambers Dawson
Chapter 3. Edward Westermarck, a Master Ethnographer, and his Monograph Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926)
David Shankland
Part II: The Indigenous Ethnographer’s Magic
Chapter 4. Frontier Ethnography and Colonial Theology: Mpengula Mbande and Marginal Informants in Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–70)
David Chidester
Chapter 5. At the Feet of the Lord of the Dragons: Tutakangahau, Elsdon Best, and Waikaremoana: The Sea of the Rippling Waters (1897)
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Chapter 6. Partnership with a Native American Family: Alice C. Fletcher, Francis La Flesche, and The Omaha Tribe (1911)
Joanna Cohan Scherer
Part III: Colonial Ethnography From Invasion to Empathy
Chapter 7. Stepping into a Pit of Snakes: John Gregory Bourke and The Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884)
Ronald L. Grimes
Chapter 8. Totemic Relics and Ancestral Fetishes: Henri Trilles’s Chez les Fang, or Fifteen Years in the French Congo (1912)
André Mary
Chapter 9. “The Stream Crosses the Path”: Robert Sutherland Rattray and Ashanti (1923)
Montgomery McFate
Part IV: Expeditionary Ethnography as Intensive Fieldwork
Chapter 10. From Savages to Friends: Henrique de Carvalho and his Etnografia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda (1890)
Frederico Delgado Rosa
Chapter 11. “Do in the Tundra as the Tundra-Dwellers Do”: Maria Czaplicka, her Yenisei Expedition (1914–15), and My Siberian Year (1916)
Grażyna Kubica
Chapter 12. Developing Fieldwork in the South American Lowlands: Debates and Practices in the Work of German Ethnographers (1884–1928)
Michael Kraus
Conclusion: Founders of Anthropology and Their Predecessors
Han F. Vermeulen and Frederico Delgado Rosa
Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Ethnographic Accounts, c.1870–1922
Han F. Vermeulen and Frederico Delgado Rosa
Index
