Read more
The origins of anthropology lie in expeditionary journeys. But since the rise of immersive fieldwork, usually by a sole investigator, the older tradition of team-based social research has been largely eclipsed. Expeditionary Anthropology argues that expeditions have much to tell us about anthropologists and the people they studied. The book charts the diversity of anthropological expeditions and analyzes the often passionate arguments they provoked. Drawing on recent developments in gender studies, indigenous studies, and the history of science, the book argues that even today, the 'science of man' is deeply inscribed by its connections with expeditionary travel.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume
Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE FIELD: INTERMEDIARIES AND EXCHANGE Chapter 1. Assembling the Ethnographic Field: The 1901-02 Expedition of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen
Philip Batty Chapter 2. Receiving guests: The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait 1898
Jude Philp Chapter 3. Donald Thomson's Hybrid Expeditions: Anthropology, Biology and Narrative in Northern Australia and England
Saskia Beudel PART II: EXPLORATION, ARCHAEOLOGY, RACE AND EMERGENT ANTHROPOLOGY Chapter 4. Looking at Culture through an Artist's Eyes: William Henry Holmes and the Exploration of Native American Archaeology
Pamela Henson Chapter 5. The Anomalous Blonds of the Maghreb: Carleton Coon Discovers the African Nordics
Warwick Anderson Chapter 6. Medium, Genre, Indigenous Presence: Spanish Expeditionary Encounters in the Mar del Sur, 1606
Bronwen Douglas Chapter 7. Ethnographic Inquiry on Phillip Parker King's Hydrographic Survey
Tiffany Shellam PART III: THE QUESTION OF GENDER Chapter 8. Gender and the Expedition: Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and the Politics of Fieldwork in the Americas in the 1920s and 1930s
Desley Deacon Chapter 9. What Has Been Forgotten? The Discourses of Margaret Mead and The American Museum of Natural History Sepik Expedition
Diane Losche Chapter 10. Gender, Science and Imperial Drive: Margaret McArthur on Two Expeditions in the 1940s
Amanda Harris Index
About the author
Martin Thomas is Professor of History at the Australian National University and Co-Director of the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London. His publications include The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011) and Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (2015), with the former winning the National Biography Award of Australia.
Amanda Harris is Senior Research Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of the digital archive PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures). Her book Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-70 was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020. Her edited book Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media was published in 2014.
