
































Microsoft Word - Barron_Ethnographers before Malinowski_11-22-23.docx


 1 

 
 

ROSA, FREDERICO DELGADO, AND HAN F. VERMEULEN, eds. 2022. Ethnographers 

before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922. EASA Series 44. New 

York: Berghahn Books. 

 

In terms of form, Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 

1870-1922 stands in contrast to similar edited volumes such as the University of Nebraska 

Press’s ongoing Histories of Anthropology Annual—headed by Regna Darnell and Frederic 

Gleach and the University of Wisconsin Press’s now defunct History of Anthropology Series—

formerly under the editorial eye of George Stocking and, later, Richard Handler. Whereas 

Darnell and Gleach are deliberately loose in their thematic organization, Ethnographers before 

Malinowski is topically streamlined. Whereas Stocking and Handler often narrowed their content 

to a handful of detailed essays, the current volume includes 12 chapters—not counting a forward 

from Thomas Hylland Eriksen and jointly authored introduction and conclusion from the editors 

Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han Vermeulen.   

 

Perhaps more notable is the rather pointed nature of Rosa and Vermeulen’s editorial intent. As 

they articulate in their rather dense introduction, which is in many respects a stand-alone essay in 

its own right, they seek to challenge received wisdom by “recovering” the “forgotten or 

neglected monographies produced by ethnographers whose work, surpassed and overshadowed 

by that of later anthropologists, may both enlighten and question the dichotomy between canonic 

models of writing culture and ‘pre-Malinowskian’ ones” (2). Through this pursuit, the editors 

suggest the notion that Malinowski’s much mythologized and protracted excursion to the 

Trobriand Islands constituted a methodological revolution in the discipline is in need of serious 

qualification if not outright rejection. Though his name graces the cover and virtually every 

chapter, Malinowski, despite his Polish origins, functions more as a synecdoche of a kind of a 



 2 

dogged “Anglocentrism” that continues to haunt the historiography (if not the history) of 

anthropology (3). The editors suggest that entangled in this privileging of Western European 

ethnographers working in Malinowski’s wake are various dichotomies that begin to crumble 

upon deeper historical analysis including armchair anthropology vs off the veranda, academic vs. 

amateur, evolutionist vs. humanist, and colonial vs. anti-colonial.  

 

In an effort to put these assumed breaks and dichotomies to the test, the editors have 

conveniently organized the volume into four thematic sections with each part building on the 

former. Part I brings the reader’s attention to the raison d’être of the ethnographic project as 

articulated in most introductory textbooks: to glimpse the world from “the native’s point of 

view.” Contrary to the long dominant narrative that positions Malinowski as the origin point, the 

three chapters in this section show how such disparate figures as Franz Boas, Katie Langloh 

Parker, and Edward Westermarck were already conjuring their own form of ethnographic magic 

before Malinowski stepped foot off the veranda. This proverbial magic is reimagined in Part II as 

the often-referenced colonial gaze of early ethnography is subverted—but not entirely rejected. 

The reader comes to see how the ethnographic accounts of individuals such as Henry Callaway, 

Elsdon Best, and Alice Fletcher were made possible by their enduring relationships with 

Indigenous ethnographers including Mpengula Mbande (in Callaway’s case), Tutakangahau (in 

Best’s case), and Francis La Flesche (in Fletcher’s case). Immersed in and made possible by what 

George Stocking once termed “colonial situations” (1992), these collaborations constructed 

windows (some more translucent than others) into the lives of Indigenous peoples disrupted by 

the conditions of conquest and settlement. Part III puts the colonial conditions in more stark 

relief with cases from turn-of-the century Arizona and Africa where military/colonial 

ethnologists and Roman Catholic priests slide along a spectrum of invasion and empathy 

troubling the notion of a discrete divide between colonial and anti-colonial ethnography. Part IV 

picks up on the empathetic thread by turning the volume’s attention to the expeditionary variants 

of pre-Malinowskian ethnography suggesting that mythologized sojourns could be sites of both 

understanding and methodological innovation.   

 

The virtues of the volume are numerous, none-the-least of which being the geographic scope of 

the case studies. For this reader, it is the volume’s ability to push against a caricatured view of 



 3 

salvage ethnography—one that strips the subjects of ethnographic research of their agency—that 

is most stimulating. Without casting an artificially rose-colored tint that would have us believe 

that salvage pursuits were devoid of colonial entanglements (they were called into being by the 

effects of conquest!), the varied case studies spotlight the motivations and creative calculations 

of Indigenous ethnographers and interlocutors who saw in these itinerant outsiders a certain 

degree of use value. Hardly the kind of stories upon which one would want to mount a public 

relations campaign for the discipline but a useful qualifier for some of the more kneejerk and 

empirically thin assessments of late 19th and early 20th century fieldwork. Such histories have 

humbling qualities for practicing anthropologists who may have largely absorbed the discipline’s 

past through corridor talk and anecdotal asides.  

 

And yet, I cannot help but detect a slight irony at play in the framing of the project. As detailed 

in their introduction, Rosa and Vermeulen are troubled by a kind of “postcolonial anxiety” in 

prior works that have purported “to demonstrate the ethnographic nature of the colonial 

machine” (18-19). The irony, however, is their circumscribed engagement with these 

postcolonial anxieties. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink’s 1994 article, “Five Theses on 

Ethnography as Colonial Practice” stands in for a body of literature that, from this reviewer’s 

perspective, is quite varied. Moreover, there are recent additions to the conversation that do not 

figure into the framing. Perhaps a more direct engagement with the works of Aaron Glass, Isaiah 

Wilner, or Margaret Bruchac (the latter does appear in the endnotes) would make the stakes of 

this “counter-critique” more tangible. Without it, statements such as “[w]hile we acknowledge 

the import of this trend, we are also inclined to embrace diversity among historians of 

anthropological ethnological sciences” appear a bit evasive (22). To be fair, the editors do argue 

that the contemporary “radical postcolonial critique” has reached “hegemonic” proportions (31). 

This would suggest that the evasive nature of the framing and the pivot to “diversity” is 

deliberate. In his own work, Rosa has offered a direct and thorough evaluation of Johannes 

Fabian’s canonical musings on ethnographic writing (2019). And I suspect Rosa would count 

Fabian amongst the promoters of postcolonial apprehension alongside Pels and Salemink. So 

perhaps that just means the onus is on another set of editors/authors to bring the full range of 

“radical postcolonial critique” into the mix. And whoever that author (or authors) might be, they 

would do well to count Rosa and Vermeulen’s humbling volume amongst their reading list.  



 4 

 

 

 

 

References 
Rosa, Frederico Delgado. 2019. “Totalitarian Critique: Fabian and the History of Primitive 

Anthropology.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, edited by Regna 

Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 1–50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 

Stocking, George W., ed. 1992. Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of 

Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 

 

Nicholas Barron is a historical anthropologist whose research interests concern 

colonial/imperial studies, Indigenous politics, and the history of anthropology in North America. 

His writings have appeared in History and Anthropology, Histories of Anthropology Annual, 

BEROSE: International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology, and the Journal of 

Anthropological Research. He currently teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the 

University of Nevada, Las Vegas while also serving as a Managing Editor for the History of 

Anthropology Review and the Book Review Editor for Anthropology and Humanism.  

 

 

  

© 2023 Nicholas Barron 

 

 


