The origins of anthropology lie in expeditionary journeys. But since the rise of immersive fieldwork, usually by a sole investigator, the older tradition of team-based social research has been largely eclipsed.Expeditionary Anthropology argues that expeditions have much to tell us about anthropologists and the people they studied. The book charts the diversity of anthropological expeditions and analyzes the often passionate arguments they provoked. Drawing on recent developments in gender studies, indigenous studies, and the history of science, the book argues that even today, the science of man is deeply inscribed by its connections with expeditionary travel.

Amanda Harris is Senior Research Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of the digital archive PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures). Her bookRepresenting Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-70 was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020. Her edited bookCirculating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media was published in 2014.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume
Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE FIELD: INTERMEDIARIES AND EXCHANGE

Chapter 1.Assembling the Ethnographic Field: The 1901-02 Expedition of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen
Philip Batty

Chapter 2.Receiving guests: The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait 1898
Jude Philp

Chapter 3.Donald Thomsons Hybrid Expeditions: Anthropology, Biology and Narrative in Northern Australia and England
Saskia Beudel

PART II: EXPLORATION, ARCHAEOLOGY, RACE AND EMERGENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Chapter 4.Looking at Culture through an Artists Eyes: William Henry Holmes and the Exploration of Native American Archaeology
Pamela Henson

Chapter 5.The Anomalous Blonds of the Maghreb: Carleton Coon Discovers the African Nordics
Warwick Anderson

Chapter 6.Medium, Genre, Indigenous Presence: Spanish Expeditionary Encounters in the Mar del Sur, 1606
Bronwen Douglas

Chapter 7.Ethnographic Inquiry on Phillip Parker Kings Hydrographic Survey
Tiffany Shellam

PART III: THE QUESTION OF GENDER

Chapter 8.Gender and the Expedition: Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and the Politics of Fieldwork in the Americas in the 1920s and 1930s
Desley Deacon

Chapter 9.What Has Been Forgotten? The Discourses of Margaret Mead and The American Museum of Natural History Sepik Expedition
Diane Losche

Chapter 10.Gender, Science and Imperial Drive: Margaret McArthur on Two Expeditions in the 1940s
Amanda Harris

Index