Expeditionary Anthropology

Martin Thomas is Professor of History at the Australian National University and Co-Director of the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London. His publications include The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011) and Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (2015), with the former winning the National Biography Award of Australia.

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 Thomson’s 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 Artist’s 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 King’s 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