Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture

Abstract

This volume brings together a dozen or so studies that afford vivid insight into the diversity and complexity of expeditionary collecting between the First and Second World Wars. The chapters are structured more or less chronologically and explore an impressive range of expeditions and collecting practices in diverse locations: Africa, the Americas, the Soviet Union, Iran, New Guinea and Australia. The expeditions variously collected zoological, botanical and ethnographic specimens, recorded census data, and shot still and motion pictures. Their aims fluctuated from scientific to popular/commercial, to governmental and military. The editors seek to challenge the persistence of the rhetoric of first contact that expeditions and their films helped to create, by excavating their histories of global interaction and exchange and the visual economies they helped to create. They argue that adventure expeditions of this period, and more particularly the film footage shot, constitute a missing link between anthropology and popular culture – one that has been consistently downplayed in the history of anthropology.