Ethnographers Before Malinowski - (Easa) by Frederico Delgado Rosa & Han F Vermeulen (Paperback)

About the Book

At a time when anthropologists claim new ethnographic experiences, a second chance should be given to older ethnographic texts. 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.

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.

Review Quotes

"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