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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses fieldwork-based ethnographic research undertaken parallel to anthropological studies of race during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two cases from the extensive ethnographic archive will be analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific studies of race became important during the nineteenth century. Yet ethnography as the description of peoples and nations (ethnographia) had been introduced during expeditionary fieldwork in Northern Asia during the eighteenth century. Recent research demonstrates that in the fifty years before Malinowski’s magnum opus 220 ethnographers produced 365 ethnographic accounts worldwide. Our edited volume, Ethnographers Before Malinowski, presents some of this neglected work. We will focus on two such cases from Germany and Portugal. Adolf Bastian, the founder of the Berlin Ethnological Museum and “father of modern German ethnology,” published 80 books, five of which are ethnographic accounts of his work in Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Two of his closest associates, Franz Boas and Karl von den Steinen, conducted ethnographic fieldwork and collected artifacts in Canada and Brazil respectively. All three were natural scientists, who were aware of physical anthropology but preferred to carry out ethnographic fieldwork and focus on material and spiritual culture. They were part of a relativist and anti-racist movement spreading out from Berlin. Henrique de Carvalho was a Portuguese explorer, who joined an exiled Lunda prince during a journey to return to the Lunda empire’s capital in Central Africa and published an extensive account, Etnografia e história tradicional, in 1890. Carvalho considered but then rejected physical anthropology (by refusing to collect bones and by criticizing the data obtained from skulls) in order to focus on ethnography. These cases show that ethnographic research was often preferred over physical anthropology.