Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.

Han F. Vermeulen is Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, specializing in the history and theory of anthropology. He is author or editor of a dozen books, including Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), which was listed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as one of the most important books of 2016 and was awarded the ICAS Book Prize 2017 by the International Convention of Asia Scholars.