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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]

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]