ABSTRACT
In 1901 Franz Boas dispatched Berthold Laufer on an anthropological mission to China. At the time, Boas taught anthropology at Columbia University and curated the ethnology (the study of peoples or cultures) and somatology (the study of the body) section of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Also at the time, American anthropology (the American Ethnological Society had been founded in 1842) was understandably focused on Native American societies, so the Laufer expedition was a significant new direction for the field. Even so, based very much in the museum as an institutional site, anthropology “was still a material as much as an ethnographic enterprise” with its eyes set firmly on gathering “collections of the material culture of those whom they encountered, measured, photographed, and recorded” (Kendall, 2014: 8). In particular, Laufer was commissioned “to document Chinese handicraft industries and acquire the tools of production” (20), so as to create a display of Chinese technical and material culture at the AMNH; he also sought to obtain some heads from executed Chinese criminals. Trained in languages and philology, Laufer concentrated too much on texts and art for Boas’ taste, and he also complained of “the particular
