ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the formalisation of ethnography as a mode of acquiring and representing knowledge of other cultures. It aims is to analyse the claims to specialist knowledge made by the new generation of fieldwork practitioners who emerged during the late nineteenth century and within a climate of energetic attempts to standardise ethnographic practice. The implications of such exercises in selectivity had their greatest impact on the status of both indigenous and European women’s testimony as legitimate ethnographic material. The names of Alfred W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison have generally appeared in accounts of the history of anthropology as the archetypal ‘men on the spot’: the valued correspondents of the metropolitan comparative anthropologists. The methodological conversion occurring at the end of the century is thus predicated on an interest in the specific ‘tribal’ customs through which distinct versions of primitive masculinity are formalised.
