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This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang's representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang's works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang's visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of "Mongoloid" or "Yellow" racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of "Mongoloid/Yellow." His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the ethnographic encounter between two Aboriginal men and various Australian anthropologists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. These men, Mickey Dow Dow and Jim Kite, played a critical role in the development of a body of knowledge associated with Australian Aboriginal people. The important role that these men played in shaping an understanding of Aboriginal relationships to place, personhood and myth is significant. By critically interrogating the field notebooks and diaries of the seminal Australian ethnographers that worked with these men I bring to the fore the nature of these engagements and discuss the various ways in which ideas were communicated. Critically, it was illustrations, maps and acts of translation and performance that often worked to bridge the gap between understandings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Klaus Neumann's critical approach to Pacific history which attends to the 'trash' of the past – 'the irrelevant, the insignificant, the marginal, and the negligible' – this paper revisits the margins of our sources. Captions, doodles, annotations and other forms of marginal trash need to be addressed in their own right, and for the light they shed on the main body of source materials, whether textual, audio-visual, or artefactual. The folio drawings produced by the Russian anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay in Oceania between 1871 and 1883 provide an exemplary if fragmentary archive through which the interplay of the central and the marginal, the visual and the textual, can be considered. The visual richness of his sketches and the scope for historical and ethnographic analysis and reconstruction are considerably enhanced and extended by focusing on his many marginal scribbles, which include obvious captions as well as stray observations, word-lists, and other commentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which the dead trouble the otherwise strong commitment in the human sciences to the centrality of cultural and historical specificities. Focusing on the work of the anthropologist, Katherine Verdery, and the historian, Thomas Laqueur, the article considers how they deploy the concept of 'enchantment' to make sense of, or, at least, room for, what they see as the special qualities of the dead body, when it comes to its cultural emplacement. The article concludes by situating this work on the troublesome dead in relation to other trends within academia softening the line on enchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the life and work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre (1888–1971), a Belgian explorer and ethnographer. While fragments of his oeuvre are familiar to scholars of South America, he is almost completely unknown in historical studies, and largely forgotten within anthropology too. Here we will explore his filmic work as well as its contribution to the history of visual anthropology. While de Wavrin's work cannot be divorced from the discipline's colonial and Eurocentric heritage, we show that his visual record provides notable historic insights and merits further scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

François Levaillant (also Le Vaillant, born Vaillant) was the most influential early traveler to South Africa. His narrative illustrations of his travels, however, have not been widely studied, in part because many were not published in his travel books. Levaillant's role as a founding figure of African anthropology has received increased attention, but illustrations of his first visit to the Gonaqua deserve greater scrutiny, in part because they differ so markedly from his written account. This article argues, following Matthys Bokhorst, that Levaillant conceptualized and produced most of the illustrations himself and concludes that he gave the illustrations an allegorical force as a way of re-viewing, re-considering and theorizing the significance of his visit and his role as observer and anthropologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the history of anthropology. Topics discussed include the 100th death anniversary of anthropologists Sir Edward B. Tylor and Émile Durkheim, the contributions of anthropology's founding fathers Bronislaw Malinowski to the field, and the author's suggested books related to anthropology.

During the 1860s the sciences relating to human diversity were undergoing significant intellectual and methodological changes. The older generation of practitioners including James Cowles Prichard, Thomas Hodgkin and John Crawfurd were slowly passing away. Recognising that there was an opportunity to take a leading role in reforming the study of human variation, two competing intellectual camps vied for control of the nascent discipline; anthropologists led by James Hunt, and ethnologists led by Thomas Huxley. Taking their observational practices and vocational strategies as its starting point, this paper seeks to expand our understanding of the debates surrounding British race studies during the 1860s. In doing so, this paper takes seriously Hunt and Huxley's self-descriptions as scientific reformers. Both of these figures promoted strategies for transforming the sciences relating to human diversity. Each believed they were strengthening anthropology and ethnology's best aspects and dispensing with their weakest. Moreover, their training in natural history, anatomy and physiology can be seen to have influenced their observational practices when it came to identifying and classifying human varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We now expect that an anthropologist's temperament and life experience, including personal and academic relationships with key informants, shape at least to a degree that person's scholarly interest and writing. Geoffrey Gorer and François (Féral) Benga, whose lives crosscut those of a number of leading intellectual and artistic figures of interwar Britain, France, and the USA, offer one example of how ethnographic partnership may come to shape a corner or two of disciplinal history. In 1934, before Margaret Mead encouraged his anthropological career, Gorer toured West Africa with Benga who had come to France from Senegal to perform in the Folies Bergères. Gorer [(1935. Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knoft)] published an account of their travels as Africa Dances. This collaboration would shape Gorer's subsequent contributions to the broader contours of culture and personality theory and national character study before and after World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controversy, and these concerns persisted into a second generation as evolutionism was marginalized and prehistoric archaeology matured. Although the eolith debate finally floundered in the debris of the “epistemic rupture” between the world of Victorian evolutionism and late twentieth-century anthropology, some of its technical pre-occupations—particularly in relation to what we would now call ethnographic analogies and in terms of the techniques for distinguishing artefacts from geofacts—persist and are very much current issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the time that Julian Steward was formulating the Puerto Rico Project, several other approaches to complex societies were being pursued by American anthropologists. Beginning in the 1920s, funders'—and subsequently, New Deal agencies'—interest in addressing social problems impelled microcosmic community studies in the United States. That approach, essentially functionalist and ahistorical, was extended to village studies in other countries, and Redfield's folk-urban continuum became the dominant theoretical framework for comprehending regions within nations. Concurrently, acculturation theory legitimized anthropological interests beyond “primitives” and offered an alternative, two-way cultural contact model. With the onset of World War II, the culture and personality approach was applied to strategic nations, providing holistic configurational depictions of national character. Steward's effort can be seen as a critique of, and alternative to, these approaches that were prevalent in the late 1940s. Building upon his method of cultural ecology, his orientation toward work, and his notions about sociocultural integration, he devised a different way of studying a total society. Steward's framework was modified and expanded by members of his team, both in the field and in the writing of the jointly authored book. While slow to have a wider impact, the project—both in its successes and its limitations—signaled new departures for the anthropological study of the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndt's writing at times obscured the core insights that he had about Yolngu society, and partly as a consequence Australian anthropology has not yet made the best use of the immense richness of his ethnographic legacy. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndt's writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the anthropological study of India, examining the challenges of a anthropologist who studies his own culture. An exploration of India-West dialogue is presented, including a reflection on the forces of globalizing history and cultural politics. Topics include anthropological studies in India in the 1950s, Indian-born anthropologists living abroad who find themselves in a trans-cultural narrative, and the goal of an anthropologist to decipher regional differences in order to further global human sharing.

The establishment of professional anthropology is contrasted with the flawed limits and freedom of early self-trained anthropologists working outside of the academy. The work of ethnographer and linguist Jaime de Angulo and photographer Edward S. Curtis are oppositional examples of early 20th century self-trained anthropologically informed field research. While Curtis's career illustrates how work outside of academic anthropological circles often failed to document Indian culture, de Angulo's work provides an example of a brilliant scholar producing innovative, high quality work that would have been difficult to produce under the strictures of early 20th century academic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]