Search

The history of the institutionalization of Victorian anthropology was marked, to a large extent, by the debates held between the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) and the Anthropological Society of London (ASL), and the way in which such battles were resolved, apparently, was with the foundation --in 1871-- of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI). However, previous accounts have ignored the fact that the emergence of the RAI was only possible thanks to the sustained interaction between the ESL and the ASL throughout the 1860s, at the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which were held in Britain; this involved several groups specializing in the development of the sciences. Such meetings were held in many other public spaces with regard to what took place at the Ethnological Society, or at the Anthropological Society of London. This paper is based on the media/literature of the time, archival materials, and other primary sources not previously studied, thus reconstructing the consolidation process regarding Victorian anthropology through the examination of debates on the sciences, with a special focus on the annual meetings of the BAAS, from 1863 to 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]