The Ethnographers Magic And Ot

For this collection, Stocking has written comments on each of the eight essays included, as well as an introduction providing autobiographical and historiographical context and an afterword reconsidering major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology. The essays themselves address the work and influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski; anthropology's powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired “data.”

George W. Stocking, Jr., is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Victorian Anthropology; After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951; Delimiting Anthropology, and The Ethnographer's Magic. He founded the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press and edited its first eight volumes.