ABSTRACT
In 1894, two years prior to the publication of Franz Boas’s seminal article “The Limits of the Comparative Method,” Karl von den Steinen’s Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens appeared. In this and his earlier work, Durch Zentral Brasiliens (1886), Steinen introduced his readers to an unknown region of central Brazil and its unique peoples. It was a pioneer work of the newly forming science of ethnology in Germany, soon followed by the works of other German researchers on the Xingu (e.g., Meyer 1896; Schmidt 1902). It was the first of its kind in Amazonia. Like Boas’ The Central Eskimo (1888), or Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1851),
League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois before it, it soon became one of anthropology’s first “classics.”
