In Search of Us: Twelve Adventures in Anthropology

(Paperback, Main)

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***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick***

The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations 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 as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like 'savage' were inconceivable when so-called 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars.

Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude Levi-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore explores the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study with all its insights and ambivalence. In Search of Us tells the story of the men and women whose observations of the 'other' would transform attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated.

In an enthralling, perceptive narrative, Moore shows how these radical anthropologists were inspired by their time in the furthest-flung reaches of the known world, becoming pioneers of a new way of thinking. In the end, their legacy is less about understanding foreign cultures and more about their attempts to persuade human beings to look at one another with eyes washed free from prejudice. Their intention may have been to explain what they saw as the primitive world to the civilised one but they ended up changing the way people viewed themselves - at least for a time.

Reviews

In this skilful summary of the early years of anthropology between 1880 and 1939, Lucy Moore reveals a veritable tangle of turf wars, power scrambles and sexual bad behaviour... Moore's fluent account confirms that there is always room for a new view, especially when it is as well done as this one. * Sunday Times *
Moore doesn't sugar-coat her protagonists' many prejudices, their cavalier treatment of their indigenous subjects, or the problematic history of their discipline. But though she summarises their scholarly views, the main pleasure of her book lies in its celebration of a dozen colourful, unconventional, free-thinking lives. * Guardian *
The story of anthropology's early pioneers lies at the heart of this joyfully narrated history of a scientific field that, at its best, opens our minds to the rich kaleidoscope of human experience... [A] gripping collection of life stories. * Literary Review *
Entertaining... Told with a novelistic eye for the character-revealing anecdote. * Spectator *

Author Bio

Lucy Moore is an author and broadcaster whose work includes the bestselling Maharanis: The Lives & Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses. She has written for the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, and has presented series for the BBC and Sky.