Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922(44 EASA Series)

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.

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

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.

Review :
“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 Bošković, 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 discipline’s 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