Research Catalog

Recreating first contact : expeditions, anthropology, and popular culture

Title: Recreating first contact : expeditions, anthropology, and popular culture / edited by Joshua A. Bell, Alison K. Brown, Robert J. Gordon.
Publication: Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013.

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Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Book/Text	Use in library	JFF 13-551	Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Additional Authors

Description

xii, 261 pages : illustrations; 26 cm

Summary

"Recreating First Contact explores the proliferation of adventure travel that emerged during the early twentieth century plus the themes legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During that time, new transport and recording technologies--particularly airplanes, automobiles, and small portable, still and motion-picture cameras--were used by many expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters, and they enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives in the articles, books, films, exhibitions, and lecture tours that the expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through review of several expeditions and their popular wakes, these essays (foreword, introduction + 12 additional chapters, afterward) trace complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel, and cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. In doing so, however, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives, and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered"--

Series Statement

A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge

Uniform Title

Smithsonian contribution to knowledge.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Expeditions, their films and histories : an introduction / Robert J. Gordon, Alison K. Brown, and Joshua A. Bell -- Moving image technology and archives / Pamela Wintle -- Ethnographic film practices in silent German cinema / Wolfgang Fuhrmann -- Grass before Kong : "Natives" in the films of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack / Daniel Bradburd -- First contact as real contact : the 1926/27 Soviet Polar census Expedition to Turukhansk Territory / David G. Anderson -- Camping among the Indians : visual education and the sponsored expedition film at the American Museum of Natural History / Alison Griffiths -- Mistaken gods and other misnomers of first contact of the U.S. Department of Agriculture 1928 Sugarcane Expedition to New Guinea / Joshua A. Bell -- "Beyond the end of steel" : recasting the Franklin Motor Expedition to Canada / Alison K. Brown -- On Safari with Martin and Osa Johnson / Lamont Lindstrom -- The riddle of Hell's jungle : Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel's expeditions to the primeval forests of Liberia and the Amazon during the 1930s / Holger Stoecker -- Africa speaks (but to whom?) : expeditionary anthropology in a minor key / Robert J. Gordon -- "Primitive Blacks face white man's laws" : the 1932 anthropoliogcal expedition to Mt. Liebig, Central Australia / Philip Batty -- "The Africa I know" : film and the making of "Bushmen" in Laurens van der Post's Lost world of Kalahari (1956) / Lauren van Vuuren -- Afterword / Henrika Kuklick.

Call Number

JFF 13-551

ISBN

9781935623144 (hardback)
1935623141 (hardback)

LCCN

2013000960

OCLC

828834123

Title

Recreating first contact : expeditions, anthropology, and popular culture / edited by Joshua A. Bell, Alison K. Brown, Robert J. Gordon.

Publisher

Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge

Smithsonian contribution to knowledge.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Added Author

Bell, Joshua A. (Joshua Alexander), 1973-

Brown, Alison K. (Alison Kay), 1971-

Gordon, Robert J., 1947-

Research Call Number

JFF 13-551

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