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Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At the end of the nineteenth century, British social anthropologists borrowed the term ‘field’ from modern physics to underline the scientific claim of their own empirical research. By gathering their ethnographic data through direct observation, they used recently developed audiovisual documentary techniques such as dry gelatine plate photography, wax cylinder phonographs and film cameras, which soon became standard expedition equipment. But when the time of the big ethnographic expeditions had come to an end and Malinowski proclaimed the ideal of the single fieldworker who should cut himself off completely from members of his culture and live alone in the company of the ‘natives’, all these bulky and hard to handle technical devices turned out to be impediments to realising the principles of participant observation. Moreover, they were of almost no use in studying the complex social structures of the societies on which the members of the British School focused their research. They therefore avoided bringing heavy motion picture cameras into their area of research, leaving the field to the emerging film industry, which created the new genre of semi-documentary ethnographic films. Anthropologists continued to take photographs to illustrate their monographs, but did not analyse and interpret them as autonomous subjects of scientific inquiry. Only the sound recording devices proved to be useful instruments of research by helping to store and preserve oral traditions in the vernacular that would otherwise have been lost forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the reading of Sharon Hutchinson's monograph on the nuer, this article explores the misunderstandings between contemporary anthropology and the modern classics. it tries to identify invisible genealogies that go back to the British functionalists, particularly to Evans-Pritchard, and minimizes the explicit oppositions between the present and the past of anthropology . it reveals that some classical notions are detectable in non-explicit ways among those who claim to reject them and, at the same time, that contemporary concerns have their roots in modern ethnographies. The author shows that static approaches -- as the one by Evans-Pritchard on the nuer -- had a historical meaning and recalls that British social anthropology had its own theoretical and methodological answers to the transformations of African contexts under colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1854, the Crystal Palace reopened at Sydenham. Significantly, it featured a court of natural history. Curated by the philologist and physician, Robert Gordon Latham, it was designed to provide the public with an ethnological education. Understanding Latham's project is of particular importance for broader understandings of the scientific importance of displayed peoples and mid-nineteenth-century debates on the nature of human variation. Recent scholarship has shown considerable interest in the relationship between exhibitions of foreign peoples and anthropology, particularly within the context of world fairs. Nevertheless, anthropologists are routinely claimed to have used fairs merely to display or publicly validate, rather than to make, scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the 1850s and 1860s are often seen as having witnessed the emergence of a new ‘harder-edged’ scientific racism as, older, elastic definitions of ‘race’ were successfully overthrown by one rooted in biological difference (most commonly exemplified by the anatomist Robert Knox). By examining how Latham produced and used his museum of human types, this article proposes an alternative approach. It suggests that displayed peoples were used as ethnological specimens and that Latham's work is at a particularly significant crossroads for the mid-nineteenth-century remaking of ‘race’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]