The
Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays
George W. Stocking Jr.
“It is George Stocking, more than
anyone else, who has made the history of anthropology available
to us. . . . [This] volume provides a multifaceted examination
of anthropology from the time that ‘fieldwork’ emerged as a defining
element of our profession until (almost) the present. . . . Essential
reading for anthropologists now.”
—Daniel A. Segal, American Anthropologist
For this collection, Stocking has written comments on each of
the eight essays included, as well as an introduction providing
autobiographical and historiographical context and an afterword
reconsidering major themes of the essays in relation to the recent
past and present situation of academic anthropology. The essays
themselves address the work and influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw
Malinowski; anthropology's powerfully mythic aspect and persistent
strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship
to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration
of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries;
and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively
acquired “data.”
 George W. Stocking, Jr. (1928–2013) was the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor
Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and the Committee
on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of
Chicago. He was the author of many books, including Victorian
Anthropology and After Tylor: British Social
Anthropology, 1888–1951, and was the founder and long-time
editor of the History of Anthropology series published
by the University of Wisconsin Press. He was awarded the
Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Franz
Boas Award for Exemplary Service by the American Anthropological
Association. His most recent book with the University of Wisconsin
Press is Glimpses into My Own Black Box:
An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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November 1994
LC: 92-25829 GN
448 pp. 6 x 9 19 halftones
“The Ethnographer’s Magic may be read at several
levels by practitioners from several disciplines: intellectual
history, history of science, anthropology, even comparative literature,
new cultural history, and literary criticism. Strikingly original
in its design, it presents the historiographer as composer, responsive
to his own lived experience [and] to those whom he encounters
deliberately and by chance, defensive at times, disengaging himself
from academic political sensibilities over certain issues, but,
above all, a primary researcher into the further reaches of anthropology
as a profession and as a discipline.”
—Joan Vincent, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
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