Scientists and Specimens: Early Anthropology Networks in and Between Nations and the Natural and Human Sciences

Abstract

Merging a transnational approach to the history of science with methods from museum anthropology, this chapter traces the emergence and expansion of early anthropology networks rooted special interest societies and the natural sciences. The focus here is on the interplay between practitioners and the objects – from publications to specimens – with which they worked during a singularly seminal and transient time in which the nucleus of anthropological activity migrated from scientific societies, to museums and then universities. The chapter also presents a detailed case study of the people and things that linked early anthropology in the USA and German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), inaugural director of Berlin’s ethnological museum and now considered a father of German anthropology, was a key figure in these developments, as was his one-time staff member Franz Boas (1858–1942), himself now thought of as a father of modern US anthropology. Zeroing in on their engagements in the subfield of Americanist anthropology, however, among others the scramble for Northwest Coast artifacts, World’s Columbian Expedition in Chicago, and the International School for American Archeology and Ethnology (ISAAE) in Mexico, the chapter retraces how Americanist networks grew to transcend the activity and influence of both.KeywordsInterdisciplinary histories of scienceDisciplinary coalescenceAnthropologyScholarly societiesMuseumsSpecimen exchangeScientific toursTransnational science