| Anthropology''s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1935 Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians--this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century.Rainer Buschmann here seeks to recover some of anthropology's global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier--the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884-1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone. Colonial administrators there were drawn to approaches partially inspired by anthropology. Anthropologists and museum officials exploited this interest by preparing large-scale expeditions to German New Guinea. Buschmann Rainer F. : Rainer F. Buschmann is program chair and professor of history at California State University Channel Islands. |