Ethnographers Before Malinowski

Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.

“This collection is an important event in the subfield of history of anthropology. Its editors, two well-known European scholars, have assembled an impressive collection of essays … It should be in the library of every major university.” • Andrew Lyons, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo

Frederico Delgado Rosa is lecturer at NOVA University, Lisbon (Portugal) and a researcher in the history of anthropology at CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology (Lisbon) and HERITAGES (Paris). He is the author, among other works, of Exploradores portugueses e reis africanos [Portuguese Explorers and African Kings], with Filipe Verde (A Esfera dos Livros, 2013). He is codirector, with Christine Laurière, of BEROSE International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology.