IN SEARCH OF US
ADVENTURES IN ANTHROPOLOGY LUCY MOORE
Atlantic, 320pp, £17.99
‘First came the missionaries, then the explorers and finally the anthropologists. The missionaries wanted to impose something, the explorers mostly wanted to take it away, but the anthropologists were there to meet as equals,’ Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Sunday Times, describing the book as a ‘skilful summary of the early years of anthropology between 1880 and 1939’.
Hitherto, ‘primitive’ cultures across Africa, Asia and the Americas had been studied from the comfort of libraries in Europe and America, but a new generation of scholars revolutionised their discipline by living with their subjects for extended periods of time. ‘Moore’s fast-paced book tells the stories of 12 of these men and women,’ Fara Dabhoiwala enthused in the Guardian, it is ‘packed with vignettes’. Hughes noted that the stories of some of them, particularly women such as Margaret Mead, had been ‘told quite recently in a string of excellent books’. ‘Nonetheless, Moore’s fluent accounts confirm that there is always room for a new view, especially when it is as well done as this one.’
What linked these anthropologists was their interest in using the study of exotic cultures to illuminate the peculiarities of the ‘civilised’ world. ‘Anthropology thus became a means of showing what humans had in common, rather than what separated them,’ Dabhoiwala wrote. ‘Moore doesn’t sugar-coat her protagonists’ many prejudices, their cavalier treatment of their indigenous subjects, or the problematic history of their discipline,’ Dabhoiwala concluded. ‘But though she summarises their scholarly views, the main pleasure of her book lies in its celebration of a dozen colourful, unconventional, free-thinking lives.’