Putting anthropology in its (hospitable) place: Harry Shapiro’s fieldwork on Pitcairn Island, 1934–1935

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging, sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of ‘gossip’. However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as investigator and subject understood in different ways the meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they co-produced. Ultimately, Shapiro’s ambivalent approach to the status of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with Pitcairn’s local hospitable forms.