In the late 19th century, non-European societies were widely regarded as 'living fossils', offering a convenient glimpse into the West's own evolutionary past. Anthropology emerged as an exhilarating new discipline, attracting some of the sharpest minds in academia - part science, part travelogue, and occasionally part endurance test. Yet by the mid-20th century, after two world wars had demonstrated just how destructive 'civilised' societies could be, colonialism was increasingly recognised as inseparable from exploitation, and labels such as 'savage' became intellectually, and morally, untenable. Focusing on 12 key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from the pioneer Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to the trickster Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil 50 years later, Lucy Moore traces the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific discipline, complete with its methodological brilliance, blind spots and uneasy contradictions. Other researchers include Daisy Bates and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in Western Australia 1910-1912, Ruth Benedict in the American Southwest 1920s, Margaret Mead in Samoa 1925, and the bluestocking Audrey Richards in Zambia 1930-31. Their close observations of the 'other' would unexpectedly transform thinking about race, gender equality, sexual freedom, parenting and tolerance, often to the surprise of the observers themselves. Their legacy is ultimately less about cataloguing foreign cultures than about persuading human beings to look at one another with minds and footnotes cleared of prejudice. They may have set out to explain the so-called primitive world and foreign cultures to the civilised one, but instead they ended up unsettling the very idea of civilisation itself, at least for a while. 311 pages, archive photos.
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