In early twentieth-century Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode sparked a controversy with his sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city's museums. Debates about the role and structure of museums played out in 1907 and 1910 with two striking series of...

Bringing together the work of over twenty international scholars from various disciplines, "Cultural Histories of the Material World" provides a substantial collection of works that explore materiality and material culture from a historical perspecti...

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were pioneers in using visual anthropological techniques to study the aesthetics of bodily motion in Bali. What is less well known is that they also collected textiles, paintings, puppets, and carving...

Today, China's classical antiquity is often studied through recovered artifacts, but before this practice became widespread, scholars instead reconstructed the distant past through classical texts and transmitted illustrations. Among the most importa...

In the late nineteenth century, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertw...

In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific".The Anthropology of Expeditions" draws together contributions from anthropologi...