ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists constructed evolutionist schemata using information gathered from the texts of classical antiquity (Cato, Caesar, Herodotus, Plutarch, Tacitus, Xenophanes, etc.), to which an ever-growing body of ethnographic data was gradually added. Important early nineteenth-century expeditions included the voyage of Nicolas Thomas Baudin from Le Havre to the South Sea Islands, begun in 1800 (J. Jamin and J. Copans, The Origins of French Anthropology: Memoranda of the Society for the Observation of Man in Year VIII, Paris, 1979), and the mission undertaken by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 to explore the Missouri River and follow its distributaries downstream to the Pacific Ocean. In the USA further expeditions followed that of Lewis and Clark, many of them outside US territory. The most important of these was the Wilkes Expedition to the South Pacific of 1837–1842. Important institutional developments in America were Schoolcraft’s founding of the Algic Society in 1832, the creation by Albert Gallatin of the American Ethnological Society in 1842, and the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. In London, the Asiatic Journal first appeared in 1816, and in 1823 the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded as a focus for interest in the religious institutions, costumes, languages, literatures and arts of Asia. The Society published a journal and also monographs devoted to Oriental subjects, and expanded with the establishment of a Bombay branch in 1841 and a Ceylon branch (at Colombo) in 1845. The year 1843 saw the emergence of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, which later gained a royal charter. The British Crown annexed Punjab in 1849, dissolved the East India Company in 1858, and imposed indirect rule. In the same period J. D. Cochrane crossed Siberia on foot, R. Caillié reached Timbuktu, and J. L. Burckhardt and R. F. Burton wrote accounts of their celebrated voyages to Arabia and the Orient. In his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published in 1871, Morgan was able to present the kinship nomenclatures of most of what he calls the ‘branches of the human family’ on every continent, failing to do so only in the cases of the ‘Negroid nations’ and the Aborigines of Australia (1871: 467). While Sub-Saharan Africa was still little documented by the beginning of the twentieth century, Australia had already been extensively studied by the end of the nineteenth. After having been rather unsuccessfully colonized by British convicts from 1788 onwards, the Australian continent saw an inrush of thousands of immigrants drawn by the discovery of gold in New South Wales. Some of these would take an interest in the Aborigines and supply a rich ethnography of their social structures, of which they were both the first and last scientific witnesses (L. R. Hiatt, Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996)). Names not treated below include such writers on Australia as R. H. Matthews, C. Strehlow and A. Kremer, as well as the precursors of British Africanist anthropology: M. Kingsley (1862–1900), who wrote Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899); C. Kingsley Meek (1885–1965), a colonial administrator best known as the author of The Northern Tribes of Nigeria (1925); and R. Rattray (1881–1938), author of the celebrated Ashanti (1923).
