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

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. 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 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 2. “A Sympathetic Chronicler of a Sympathetic People”: Katie Langloh Parker and The Euahlayi Tribe (1905) • Barbara Chambers Dawson 3. Edward Westermarck, a Master Ethnographer, and His Monograph Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926) • David Shankland PART II. THE INDIGENOUS ETHNOGRAPHER’S MAGIC 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 5. At the Feet of the Lord of the Dragons: Tutakangahau, Elsdon Best, and Waikare-moana: The Sea of the Rippling Waters (1897) • Jeffrey Paparoa Holman 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 7. Stepping into a Pit of Snakes: John Gregory Bourke and The Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) • Ronald L. Grimes 8. Totemic Relics and Ancestral Fetishes: Henri Trilles’s Chez les Fang, or Fifteen Years in the French Congo (1912) • André Mary 9. “The Stream Crosses the Path”: Robert Sutherland Rattray and Ashanti (1923) • Montgomery McFate PART IV. EXPEDITIONARY ETHNOGRAPHY AS INTENSIVE FIELDWORK 10. From Savages to Friends: Henrique de Carvalho and His Etnografia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda (1890) • Frederico Delgado Rosa 11. “Do in the Tundra as the Tundra-Dwellers Do”: Maria Czaplicka, Her Yenisei Expedition (1914–15), and My Siberian Year (1916) • Grażyna Kubica 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, ca. 1870–1922 Index Recovering monographs produced c.1870-1922 that dispute canonic models of writing culture, the present volume challenges the assumption that fieldwork carried out within a single context by a single individual, with its corresponding output, the monograph, was a twentieth-century invention.