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.
Recenzijos
This is a valuable and important book, a timely addition to the growing field of literature in both anthropology and the history of ideas. It is also a reminder of the valuable heritage that some learned women and men have left for us, with important lessons that can serve us well in navigating through the complexities of contemporary debates. Aleksandar Bokovi, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (2023)
Ethnographers before Malinowski is a fundamental reference work in the history of anthropology. Hopefully, history will reserve a place for it alongside the other titans of our disciplines historiography Erik Petschelies, Anthropology Today (2022)
For its erudition, as much as for the issues it addresses and the finesse of its analyses, Ethnographers before Malinowski is a must-read for historians and anthropologists alike, for whom this imposing volume will have demonstrated the relevance of the ethnographic archive. Beatrice Di Brizio, European Journal of Social Sciences (2024)
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
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 Natives Point of View
Chapter
1. Adapt Fully to Their Customs: Franz Boas as an Ethnographer
among the Inuit of Baffinland (188384) 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 Ethnographers Magic
Chapter
4. Frontier Ethnography and Colonial Theology: Mpengula Mbande and
Marginal Informants in Henry Callaways The Religious System of the Amazulu
(186870)
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 Trilless 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 (191415), and My Siberian Year (1916)
Grayna Kubica
Chapter
12. Developing Fieldwork in the South American Lowlands: Debates and
Practices in the Work of German Ethnographers (18841928)
Michael Kraus
Conclusion: Founders of Anthropology and Their Predecessors
Han F. Vermeulen and Frederico Delgado Rosa
Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Ethnographic Accounts, c.18701922
Han F. Vermeulen and Frederico Delgado Rosa
Index
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 Lauričre, of BEROSE International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology.
