In 1887, Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer left England to study Australian aborigines. Spencer began to work with Frank Gillen, the operator of a telegraph station and an initiated elder of the Aranda tribe-a remarkable man who was befriending aborigines at a time when most whites were persecuting them. Gillen's special place in aboriginal society enabled both men to witness scenes that no white man had ever seen. The approach the two men used to study the aborigines has strongly influenced the way that other cultures have been studied since. Their method came to be known as fieldwork.
Franz Boas was the first distinguished social scientist in the United States to challenge the prevailing concept of racial inferiority. He actively campaigned on behalf of black people in America in the early part of the 20th century. Considered the founding father of American anthropology, Boas taught at Columbia University for fifty years, encouraging his students to follow his example by actually working in the field. Among those who did so was Margaret Mead.
William Rivers, trained as a doctor, administered psychological tests to the islanders of the Torres Straits north of Australia and discovered the importance of relatives in their society. His work as a psychologist and medical researcher enabled him to bring something new to anthropology: a scientific approach. His field study with a hill tribe in southern India, the Todas, ultimately set the trend for anthropologists to go and visit the cultures in which they were interested, rather than staying at home and theorizing.
Bronislaw Malinowski changed the way that field studies were carried out. He worked on a remote group of Pacific islands-the Trobriands-and lived for long periods among the people he was studying. A brilliant linguist, he quickly learned their language and later published books which brought the islanders to life. The idea that native peoples were primitive savages was altered for good with Malinowski's insight into their mastery of their world.
1985
Although her fieldwork has been criticized, Margaret Mead was one of the foremost fieldworkers of her day. In the United States, Bali, and New Guinea, she examined child development, sex, and temperament to see what role society plays in making people what they are. She emphasized that humans arrange their social worlds in many different ways, and that qualitative judgments cannot be made between them.
Edward Evans-Pritchard was the first trained anthropologist to do work in Africa, where he lived among the Azande and studied their belief in witchcraft. Later, he worked with the Nuer tribe in the Sudan. His work on witchcraft caused philosophers to ask how rational thinking could be defined; his study of tribal organization intrigued political theorists; his attention to the sophisticated religious sentiments of so-called primitive peoples has strongly influenced theologians.