A frictionless history of fieldwork: In Search of Us reviewed

To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to be marked by a consciousness of original sin. Contemporary ethnographies are full of passionate mea culpas from scholars concerned that they have inherited the guilt of their discipline’s founding fathers, men who inhabited a world of red-cheeked missionaries and pith-helmeted viceroys.

Lucy Moore is not the most natural candidate for a historian of the discipline. Her back-catalogue shows her to be a generalist and belletrist – a book on the Roaring Twenties, one on Indian princesses and another on Georgian rakes. Her prose is fluent and soothing, her narratives informative without being especially taxing, their outlook humane but never subversive.

‘I’m concerned with life stories,’ she writes in the introduction to In Search of Us, ‘not academic critique.’ The life stories in her book are those of 12 European and American anthropologists from the 1880s to the 1930s. Her chronicles begin with ‘The Pioneer’ Franz Boas on Baffin Island marvelling at how many words the Inuit had for snow and end with ‘The Trickster’ Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, turning the ethnographic gaze back at the anthropologist himself. She wants to address what a previous historian of the subject termed ‘the central question of intellectual history’: ‘What was bugging them?’

Her need to explain every time one of her dramatis personae speaks of ‘savages’ starts to wear a little

The question helps her to bring under control what would otherwise be a surfeit of material. The results are certainly entertaining, the stories told with a novelistic eye for the character-revealing anecdote. But the book also has an air of frothiness, which might come of the fact that Moore never gets enough of an individual angle on the story to make this history distinctively hers.