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With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.
Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.
come afterwards and write within the ‘praxis’ established by the ‘authors’. Geertz argues that one can identify a number of key, praxis-originating ‘authors’ in the Barthesian sense in the history of anthropological writing. However, he then goes on to suggest that those who came later and adopted their praxes did not always do so slavishly, nor were they necessarily inferior. Thus, for Geertz, Raymond Firth was ‘probably our best Malinowskian’ while ‘Kroeber did what Boas but promised’. 1
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
This volume follows in the tracks of those scholars who have insisted that histories of anthropology should not be limited to theoretical and methodological developments in the academy. By deliberately eschewing a Whiggish interpretation of great men and great countries (read English-speaking anthropology) this volume takes an avowedly peripheral approach in order to develop a fresh perspective. It
Africa (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 6 For a succinct survey of the history of anthropology and some of its main concerns, see Henrika Kuklick, ‘History of Anthropology’, in Rofer Backhouse and Phillipa Fontaine (eds), A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 62
. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press , pp. 21–42 . Pels , P . 1999 . ‘ The Rise and Fall of the Indian Aborigines: Orientalism, Anglicism, and the Emergence of an Ethnology of India, 1833–1869 ’. In P. Pels and O. Salemink (eds). Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology . Ann
way this valuation affects our ability to assess innovation in the past. I build on the long and quite fraught history of anthropology and archaeology in Tasmania in order to demonstrate that archaeological narratives of innovation are politically potent and socially constituted. Archaeologists, I argue, have a particular insight into the question of innovation because of our deep timeframe, but also because we are used to reconstructing worlds and logics where the common-sense solutions of the contemporary world do not apply. Chapter 2 makes the case that, even
agricultural heritage. The politics of intangible heritage play a factor in this renewed attention dedicated to wheat festivals, but we have also noticed the strong emotional power of their association with the agricultural past. These emotional reactions are not confined to the moment of the festival itself: they are also at play in the preparatory phases of the event, which often involve activities, skills and sensations that directly evoke the agricultural past. The photographs that make up this chapter follow a realist documentary style that is rooted in the history of
solving a social and medical problem, we enter into a revealing juncture in the history of anthropology – the splitting off of an ‘applied’ subfield called medical anthropology. 4 No subfield of anthropology has become easier to denigrate as complicit and atheoretical, as practical in insidious ways. Yet where did this subfield come from historically? How did its practitioners
of the history of anthropology that the academic discipline was once firmly based in the ethnographic museum, but moved steadily away from it with the ascendancy of sociological questions from the 1920s onward. Though the 1980s and 1990s saw a revival of debate around art and material culture, mainstream anthropology arguably continues to drift away from the museum as a research resource or site of analysis. The paradox here is that, at the same time, the public have come to know anthropology almost exclusively through the museum. Up to and during the 1960s and