The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among
civilizations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage.
What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about
ourselves.
In the late nineteenth century when non-European societies were seen
merely as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how civilization had
evolved, anthropology was a thriving area of study. But, by the middle
of the twentieth century, it was difficult to think about ideas of
'savages' and otherness when 'civilized' man had wreaked such
devastation across two world wars, and field work was to be displaced by
sociology and the study of all human society.
By focusing on thirteen key European and American figures in this field,
from Franz Boas on Baffin Island to Zora Neale Hurston in New Orleans
and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, Lucy Moore tells the story of the
brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study, and
about the men and women whose observations of the 'other' were
unwittingly to come to bear on attitudes about race, gender equality,
sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never
anticipated.
In an enthralling and perceptive narrative, Moore shows how, unintended
though it was, these anthropologists were to become pioneers of a new
way of thinking. Their legacy is less about understanding far away
cultures and more about teaching people to look at one another 'with
eyes washed free from prejudice.' Their intention may have been to
explain the primitive world to the civilized one, but they ended up by
changing the way we think about ourselves - at least for a time.
