HAR is pleased to announce a new release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: a special issue including thirteen short papers originally delivered at a virtual round table held on July 7, 2022, at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), London, to celebrate the centennial of Bronisław Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922–2022) and the appearance of the edited volume Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork 1870-1922 (Rosa and Vermeulen, Berghahn Books, EASA Series, 2022).
Vermeulen, Han F. & Frederico Delgado Rosa (eds.). 2022. “Before and After Malinowski: Alternative Views on the History of Anthropology [A Virtual Round Table at the RAI]”, BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Chaired by David Shankland and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, with Andrew Lyons as discussant, the two-part round table at the RAI in London highlighted the history of ethnography before Malinowski’s Argonauts, the genesis of British social anthropology in 1922, and its aftermath in Britain and beyond. The resulting papers discuss the three theses that opened the round table: (1) In the fifty years before the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a growing number of ethnographers produced hundreds of ethnographic monographs worldwide, but much of their work was sidetracked or neglected by Malinowski and his followers; (2) Malinowski is still celebrated as the inventor of intensive fieldwork in a single society, despite the fact that he had many predecessors in other societies and continents pursuing the same goal; and (3) the success of British social anthropology has been partly due to its marginalizing the relative importance of other approaches such as non-functionalist ethnographies, comparative studies and ethnohistory. Participants in the round table/contributors to this special issue are (in alphabetical order): Sophie Chevalier, Barbara Chambers Dawson, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Kraus, Adam Kuper, Herbert S. Lewis, Andrew Lyons, David Mills, Frederico Delgado Rosa, David Shankland, James Urry, Han F. Vermeulen, and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
1. Han F. Vermeulen (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Before, During, and After Malinowski: A Pioneer Ethnographer, His Predecessors, and Other Anthropologists
2. Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Projecting Pre-Malinowskian Ethnography into the Future
Round Table Part I:
3. Herbert S. Lewis (Wisconsin University) Franz Boas’s Year among the Inuit of Baffinland and the Lessons he Derived from It for Anthropology
4. Barbara Chambers Dawson (Australian Academy of Sciences) Katie Langloh Parker, a Female Ethnographer of Noongahburrah Women (Euahlayi Tribe)
5. David Shankland (Director RAI/University College London) Westermarck and Social Anthropology
6. Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Henrique de Carvalho’s Intensive Fieldwork: A Nineteenth-Century Version of Malinowski’s Charter Myth
7. Michael Kraus (University of Göttingen) Developing Fieldwork and Analysing Historical Processes: German Ethnographers in South America between Recognition and Criticism
8. Andrew Lyons (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo) Canons in Anthropology? Querying the Malinowskian Revolution
Round Table Part II:
9. Adam Kuper (London School of Economics) Bringing Theory into the Field: Malinowski’s Trobriand Ethnography
10. Sophie Chevalier (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens) Anthropology after the Argonauts: Malinowski in France
11. James Urry (Wellington, New Zealand) Ethnographic Research, Ethnographic Writing, Anthropological Theory and Colonialism: Malinowski and his Early Students
12. Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt (Agnes Scott College) Franz Boas, His Students and Their Ethnographic Work, 1922–1942
13. David Mills (University of Oxford) Why Disciplines Forget: Salvage Anthropology and the Politics of Historiography
Afterword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo)
This special issue is in dialogue with the HAR resource, “Online Interactive Archive: Ethnographic Monographs before Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1870-1922)” introducing an expandable research bibliography of 365 monographs by 220 ethnographers working in the fifty years preceding the publication of Malinowski’s classic monograph, 1870–1922.
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