Frederico Delgado Rosa - Böcker

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.

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.

New Zealander ethnographer, Elsdon Best is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau. This volume is dedicated to  this important scholar, who at the same time was shadowed by metropolitan anthropology and became an excluded ancestor, along with his Māori interlocutors and ethnographic collaborators. By recentering his place as one of anthropology’s ancestors, the volume contributes to a new perception of the discipline’s past.