Article ID: CBB001221538

Ethnology in the Metropole: Robert Knox, Robert Gordon Latham and Local Sites of Observational Training (2011)

unapi

Anthropologists have traditionally separated the history of their discipline into two main diverging methodological paradigms: nineteenth-century armchair theorizing, and twentieth-century field-based research. But this tradition obscures both the complexity of the observational practices of early nineteenth-century researchers and the high degree of continuity between these practices and the techniques that came later. While historians have long since abandoned the notion that nineteenth-century ethnologists and anthropologists were merely `armchair' theorists, this paper shows that there is still much to learn once one asks more insistently what the observational practices of early researchers were actually like. By way of bringing out this complexity and continuity, this essay re-examines the work of two well-known British ethnologists, Robert Knox, and Robert Gordon Latham; looking in particular at their methods of observing, analysing and representing different racial groups. In the work of each figure, early training in natural history, anatomy and physiology can be seen to have influenced their observational practices when it came to identifying and classifying human varieties. Moreover, in both cases, Knox and Latham developed locally-based observational training sites.

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Authors & Contributors
Sera-Shriar, Efram
Meyer, Sébastien
Tarantini, Massimo
Tzanelli, Rodanthi
Staum, Martin S.
Richard, Nathalie
Concepts
Anthropology
Ethnology
Observation
Museums
Cultural anthropology
Archaeology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Prehistory
Places
Great Britain
United States
France
Polynesia
New Guinea
Portugal
Institutions
Pitt Rivers Museum (University of Oxford)
Oxford University
Crystal Palace
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