Abstract Summary
The 1874 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology was written, like other such protocols of the nineteenth century, “to promote accurate anthropological observation on the part of travelers,” enabling those who were not “anthropologists themselves to supply the information…wanted for the scientific study of anthropology at home.” It was an attempt to discipline a potentially unruly observer—officers, administrators, missionaries—one who was nevertheless charged with collecting the ‘raw data’ of anthropology. But new disciplinary constellations, methodological norms, and attitudes toward experimental subjects, were beginning to shift the ways in which questions were asked and answered during this period. Increasingly, emphasis moved from the observer to the observed, corresponding to a raft of new fieldwork instruments that engaged experiences across the sensorium. This presentation will focus on exchanges between students of language, culture, and the mind, attending to practices of interrogation that eschewed the use of language—spools of yarn, color chips, illustrated flip books, naturalia, and the like. As this partial list already suggests, attempts to innovate assays of the mind that were not mediated by translation brought anthropologists and linguists into unlikely collaborations with artists, industry, and other scientific disciplines. While highlighting the networks that gave rise to these tools, the presentation will simultaneously trace theoretical implications for how researchers conceptualized correspondences between linguistic forms, concepts, and things in the world.
