berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: At the Crossroads of Doubt
Horatiu Burcea

Part I: Bridging Travel Literature: Travelogues and Anthropology

Chapter 1. What Distinguishes Ethnography from Travel Writing? Historical Roots of an Identity Crisis
Michael Herzfeld

Chapter 2. Variations of the ‘Writer’s Ethos’ among Travellers and Anthropologists, from Experience to Writing: Nigel Barley’s Sense of Humour
Odile Gannier

Chapter 3. Henry Adams in the South Seas: an Anthropological Temptation?
Pierre Lagayette

Part II: Pseudo-Science and Proto-Ethnography

Chapter 4. Missionary Travel Writing and Anthropological Knowledge on the Map of the British Empire, 1865-1920
Maud Michaud

Chapter 5. The End of Racial Science? Measuring Difference in the Torres Straits, 1898-1899
Elise Smith

Chapter 6. From Fiction to Fieldwork: Robert Louis Stevenson as Accidental Anthropologist in the Pacific
Kevin Cristin

Part III: Ways of Seeing

Chapter 7. Painting as Ethnological Travel Documentation: George Catlin and Karl Bodmer in the Trans-Mississippi West
Robert Sayre

Chapter 8. Anthropology and the Doubtful Visions of the Pacific: Masking the Mediation of the Traveler’s Gaze
Laura Singeot

Chapter 9. ‘To the Land of the Rising Sun’: Frederick Horniman’s Travels in Japan
Ryan Nutting

Part IV: Reflexive Narratives and Identities

Chapter 10. Among the Asians: Isabella Bird-Bishop’s ‘Magnificent Savages’
Floriane Reviron-Piegay

Chapter 11. Imperial Spouses and Female Travelees in Central Asia
Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill

Chapter 12. Exploring Alaska Native Identity through Observation of its Landscapes in Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
Benjamin Ferguson

Conclusion
Horatiu Burcea

Bibliography
Index

Anthropology and Travel Writing, 19th–21st Century

From Proto-Ethnographies to Self-Reflexive Travelogues

Edited by Horatiu Burcea

298 pages, 10 figs, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-669-3 Hb Published (August 2026)

web ISBN 978-1-83695-667-9

Details

“This is a very interesting book which addresses a worthwhile topic in a rounded, incisive, exploratory yet informative manner.” • Jeremy MacClancy, University of Oxford

From the nineteenth century onward, there have been gaps between travel writing and anthropological sciences, but also commonalities and continuous interactions in the anglophone world. Through a variety of case studies resulting from a collaboration between anthropologists and literary scholars, Anthropology and Travel Writing follows the shift from armchair speculation to sustained fieldwork, from the picturesque to analytic thick description and from colonial typologies to Indigenous counter-readings. Attentive to the notions of authority, validity, identity and reflexivity, this volume explores how alterity is scrutinized and staged, delineating the aesthetic, analytic and ethical stakes of representation.

Horatiu Burcea is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Évry Paris-Saclay. His research explores the intersections of narrative, anthropology and new media, with a particular interest in historical ethnography, translation, localization and game studies.

Series: Volume 57, Methodology & History in Anthropology

Subject: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism

Area:

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC019000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Methodology; TRV010000 TRAVEL/Essays & Travelogues