Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922

by Frederico Delgado Rosa (Editor), Han F. Vermeulen (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805395669
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/10/2022
Series:	EASA Series , #44
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	540
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Frederico Delgado Rosa is lecturer at NOVA University, Lisbon (Portugal) and a researcher in the history of anthropology at CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology (Lisbon) and HERITAGES (Paris). He is the author, among other works, of Exploradores portugueses e reis africanos [Portuguese Explorers and African Kings], with Filipe Verde (A Esfera dos Livros, 2013). He is codirector, with Christine Laurière, of BEROSE International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology.

Han F. Vermeulen is Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, specializing in the history and theory of anthropology. He is author or editor of a dozen books, including Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), which was listed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as one of the most important books of 2016 and was  awarded the ICAS Book Prize 2017 by the International Convention of Asia Scholars.

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

Editorial Reviews

“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

“Ethnographers before Malinowski provides a valuable contribution on the work of those ethnographers who formed the broader mosaic of the disciplinary evolution of professional anthropology. The contributors provide visibility to those pioneers who were discarded during the historiographical sifting of the Malinowskian Revolution. Ultimately, this volume provides the historical substance that can counter the disciplinary trend”. • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“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

From the Publisher