When anthropology first turned established at English universities, its practitioners stored a fastidious distance from their topics. The Victorian grandfathers of the self-discipline, Sir Edward Tyler at Oxford and Sir James Frazer of Cambridge, primarily based their research on ethnographic supplies despatched again by missionaries and colonial directors from faraway lands. To analysis his massively influential The Golden Bough: A Research in Comparative Faith, which ultimately ran to 12 volumes, Frazer by no means travelled past Italy. The pioneering Harvard psychologist William James as soon as requested him if he’d ever really met a “native”. “Good God, no!” was Frazer’s reply.
In 1910, when the dashing Polish polymath Bronisław Malinowski joined the model new anthropology division on the LSE, its studying record contained simply 4 books, two of which had the identical title (The Races of Man). In 1913, he wrote his personal first monograph, The Household Among the many Australian Aborigines, solely on the idea of library analysis in London.
However issues have been starting to alter. The next yr, Malinowski sailed to the southern hemisphere, to embark on what turned often known as “fieldwork” – a time period borrowed from the pure sciences by his mentor Alfred Haddon, who’d began out as a zoologist, learning molluscs on the Torres Strait Islands, earlier than switching his consideration to their human inhabitants.
Malinowski and Haddon have been a part of a brand new technology of European and American students who, between the Eighteen Eighties and Thirties, revolutionised their self-discipline. As an alternative of sitting in libraries, they started to review “primitive” cultures for themselves, throughout Africa, Asia and the Americas, dwelling with their topics for prolonged durations of time after which reporting again to western readers on what they’d discovered.
Lucy Moore’s fast-paced e book tells the tales of 12 of those women and men. It begins with Franz Boas, who launched his profession by dwelling among the many Inuit of Baffin Island for a yr within the mid-Eighteen Eighties, accompanied by his home servant Wilhelm, and ended up as a professor at Columbia, the place he impressed a number of of the opposite pioneers whom Moore describes, together with Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston. It ends in 1955 with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s nice meditation on the aim and limits of anthropology, Tristes Tropiques.
In between, we meet a solid of equally mesmerising tutorial adventurers. William Rivers pioneered the therapy of shell shock at Craiglockart hospital close to Edinburgh, the place his sufferers included Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon. The confirmed bachelor Edvard Westermarck, one of many first students to talk sympathetically of “gay love”, was additionally a worldwide authority with reference to marriage. He as soon as spent the night time hidden in a gap beneath the ground of a Moroccan home as a way to acquire “an perception into the extra intimate household lifetime of the Berber”. Audrey Richards, an excellent pupil of Malinowski, bicycled throughout the highlands of what was then Rhodesia to review the impression of colonial rule on the individuals of the Bemba tribe. She additionally appreciated to lighten awkward social conditions by lighting matches along with her toes.
What linked these loosely related students, the e book suggests, was their curiosity in utilizing the research of unique cultures to light up the peculiarities of the “civilised” world. As Malinowski put it, “in greedy the important outlook of others, with reverence and actual understanding, due even to savages, we can not assist widening our personal”. Anthropology thus turned a way of exhibiting what people had in widespread, relatively than what separated them.
One admirer of William Rivers’s mental strategy was particularly impressed by “his beautiful reward of coordinating apparently unrelated info”. The identical may very well be stated of Moore. When Malinowski arrived on the Trobriand Islands, she tells us, he introduced with him 24 crates of provides, together with “lemonade crystals, tinned oysters and lobster, varied sorts of chocolate and cocoa, Spanish olives, cod roes, jugged hare, tinned and dried greens, half-hams, French brandy, tea, six totally different sorts of jam and loads of condensed milk”. He’d additionally packed virtually 5,000 tablets of drugs. However just one toothbrush.
In Search of Us is full of such vignettes. It’s a biography, not a piece of anthropology. Moore doesn’t sugar-coat her protagonists’ many prejudices, their cavalier therapy of their indigenous topics, or the problematic historical past of their self-discipline. However although she summarises their scholarly views, the principle pleasure of her e book lies in its celebration of a dozen vibrant, unconventional, free-thinking lives.
In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology by Lucy Moore is printed by Atlantic Books (£17.99). To assist the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices might apply.
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