Paper short abstract:

Within a comparative framework, this paper identifies significant monographs predating professional anthropology, while pinpointing some risks behind the search for pioneering figures. It addresses the ways in which disciplinary past may be subject to different forms of myopia or exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

Within a comparative framework, this paper highlights the existence of other Argonauts, a provocative expression that applies to monographs of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers who were overshadowed by professional anthropologists. Instead of presenting a single case study, it marshals diverse materials as pointers to the past. The myth of Malinowski as inventor of modern fieldwork has long been shattered by historians of anthropology who have brought to the fore the decisive role of a previous generation, such as the veterans of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait. Also the fame of Franz Boas's critique of evolutionism partly explains the weight of armchair anthropology in many portrayals of the discipline in the nineteenth century. The other side of the coin is his overlooking of previous ethnographies that matched his own call for thorough and minute monographic descriptions in significant ways. Are amateur ethnographers from this formative period an excluded category? The answer to this question depends on where we look for it, considering that numerous contributions to the reassessment of this or that particular case may be found in area studies journals, specialized books within specific national traditions or World Anthropologies, online encyclopaedias and dictionaries, and also, albeit in a scattered way, in mainstream publications of the English-speaking anthropological world. The disciplinary past may be subject to unconscious myopia or deliberate forms of exclusion. This paper addresses a few selected cases, while identifying some risks behind the search for pioneering figures.