Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for a reappraisal of E.B. Tylor's "Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern" (1861) as a contribution to ethnography and, more generally, for a historicist and inclusive historiography of anthropologies, exploring early forms of ethnographic writing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses recent historiographical debates on the first published book by the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) – “Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexican, Ancient and Modern”. Issued in 1861, this text offers the original results of Tylor’s observation of Mexican antiquities and modern populations, during his travels through Mexico in 1856. Although Tylor’s contemporaries did acknowledge Anahuac’s first-hand information on Mexican populations (Geological Magazine 1865), his biographers treated his work as a travelogue mainly focused on Mexican antiquities (Van Riper 2004). More recent scholarship, however, has highlighted Anahuac’s ethnographic thrust and content (Sera-Shriar 2011, 2013; Di Brizio 2017; Lacroix 2022). Such reinterpretations have been favourably received by Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han Vermeulen, who have included Anahuac in the ethnographical canon (Rosa and Vermeulen 2022).

My paper argues that the recent, contrasting interpretations of Anahuac call for a reappraisal of the observational foundations of Tylor’s first book, as well as for a more general historiographical reflection on anthropological research practices and forms of discursive knowledge-production, most notably ethnography. My contention is that by recognizing the historical variability of disciplinary observational strategies and by carefully contextualising them, we may be able to recapture past forms of anthropological knowledge and explore long neglected early ethnographies.