Research Catalog

The shaping of American ethnography : the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

Title: The shaping of American ethnography : the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 / Barry Alan Joyce.
Author: Joyce, Barry Alan.
Publication: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, ©2001.

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Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	GN663 .J69 2001	Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 196 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

"In August of 1838 the United States Exploring Expedition set sail from Norfolk Navy Yard with six ships and more than seven hundred crewmen, including technicians and scientists. Over the course of four years the expedition made stops on the east and west coasts of South America; visited Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, and Tahiti; discovered the Antarctic land mass; and explored the Fiji Islands, Tonga, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Coast of North America." "In The Shaping of American Ethnography Barry Alan Joyce illuminates the process by which the Americans on the expedition filtered their observations of the indigenous peoples they encountered through the lens of their peculiar constructions of "savagery" as shaped by the American experience. The native peoples were classified according to the prevailing American perceptions of Native Americans as "wild" and African American slaves as "docile." The use of physical characteristics such as skin color as a classificatory tool was subordinated to the perceived image of the prototypical savage. Joyce argues that the nineteenth-century explorers shared the attributes that characterize the discipline of anthropology in any age - a reliance on synthetic systems that are period- and culture-dependent. By applying American images of savagery to world cultures, American scientists and explorers of this period helped construct the foundation for an American racial world-view that contributed to the implementation of manifest destiny and laid the ideological foundations for American expansion and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Jacket.

Series Statement

Critical studies in the history of anthropology series ; v. 2

Uniform Title

Critical studies in the history of anthropology ; v. 2.

Subject

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-187) and index.

Contents

1 Motivations and Preparation 11 -- 2 Around the Horn 28 -- 3 Across the Pacific 43 -- 4 World of the Feejee 87 -- 5 Return to America 123 -- 6 Ethnography and the Legacy of the Expedition 144.

ISBN

0803225911
9780803225916

LCCN

00059963

OCLC

ocm44713375
44713375
SCSB-1212698

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library