History of Fieldwork in Anthropology: From Evolutionism to First-Hand Study

Modern anthropologists spend months, sometimes years, living inside the communities they study. That wasn’t always the norm. For much of the nineteenth century, anthropology was written from armchairs, stitched together from the accounts of missionaries, traders, and colonial officers who had actually been to the places scholars wrote about. Understanding how the discipline moved from secondhand reports to first-hand fieldwork tells us a lot about why anthropological method looks the way it does today.

The evolutionary approach and its reliance on travel accounts 🔗

Anthropology grew rapidly as a discipline after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The theory of biological evolution gave social thinkers a tempting framework: if species evolved through stages, perhaps human societies did too. This became the first major school of thought in anthropology, the evolutionary approach, concerned with tracing how societies, institutions, and customs developed from simpler to more complex forms.

The trouble was that most early evolutionary theorists never left their studies. They built grand schemes of human progress out of travel narratives, missionary letters, and administrative reports written by people who were not trained observers and often had their own biases and agendas. Data collected this way was patchy, inconsistent, and filtered through the assumptions of whoever wrote it down. Even so, a few scholars associated with this school did have some direct exposure to the societies they wrote about.

Edward Tylor and his Mexican journey 🔗

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) is often remembered as the archetypal armchair anthropologist, yet his career actually began with fieldwork of a kind. In the 1850s, poor health sent him travelling, and in Havana he met the amateur archaeologist Henry Christy, with whom he journeyed through Mexico collecting antiquities and observing local life. That 1856 trip fed directly into his first book, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, published in 1861. The book reads largely as a travelogue, but scholars examining it today note that it already shows the beginnings of Tylor’s later concerns: comparing cultural practices, weighing evidence, and thinking about how societies change over time. Still, Tylor’s serious theoretical works that followed relied far more on comparative reading than on further travel, which is why his later methodology came to be criticised as detached from the field.

Lewis Henry Morgan and the Iroquois 🔗

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), an American lawyer based in Rochester, New York, took a more sustained interest in a single community. Morgan became involved in a legal dispute over Iroquois land rights, and in the course of that work he grew close to the Seneca and the wider Iroquois Confederacy, who reportedly adopted him. This relationship led to League of the Iroquois, published in 1851, regarded as one of the first systematic ethnographic studies of a Native American group. Morgan went on to build an ambitious comparative theory of kinship and social evolution, arguing that all societies passed through the same stages, from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, with corresponding shifts in marriage and family structure. His work was influential, later shaping Friedrich Engels’s writing on the family, but it was also built on a thin foundation of direct observation stretched across an enormous, speculative comparative framework.

Museum excursions and the beginnings of fieldwork 🔗

By the second half of the nineteenth century, museums across Europe and North America were building out ethnology sections, displaying objects from societies around the world. Filling these collections required expeditions to source artefacts, and collectors were expected to write up notes on each object: who made it, how it was used, what it meant. This requirement, almost incidentally, pushed some collectors into something resembling real fieldwork.

Two expeditions from this period are usually treated as turning points. In 1898, the British researchers William Halse Rivers Rivers and Alfred Cort Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, a stretch of islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Haddon had first visited the region a decade earlier as a marine biologist, but the 1898 trip was explicitly designed as a comprehensive anthropological study covering ethnology, psychology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. During this expedition, Rivers began mapping out family trees among the islanders to make sense of unfamiliar kinship terms, a technique that developed into what became known as the genealogical method. He later refined this approach among the Toda people of the Nilgiri Hills in South India in 1901-1902, spending several months documenting Toda kinship, marriage, and ritual life in far greater depth than travel accounts ever could.

Around the same time, the American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) was doing something similar in the Arctic. In 1883, Boas sailed from Germany to Baffin Island in present-day Canada and spent close to a year among the Inuit of Cumberland Sound, learning their language, travelling with them, and living in their camps rather than observing from a distance. This period is generally treated as his introduction to anthropological fieldwork, and it shaped the emphasis on direct, sustained observation that he carried into the rest of his career.

Why the evolutionary approach came under criticism 🔗

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the evolutionary school faced growing criticism on two fronts. First, its methodology was weak: scholars were building sweeping theories about the entire span of human development without ever collecting first-hand data. Second, and more damaging, the actual evidence started contradicting the theory. Morgan, for instance, had proposed that institutions like monogamy and the nuclear family emerged only at an advanced stage of civilisation, evolving out of earlier promiscuity and group marriage. As anthropologists began doing closer, sustained fieldwork, they found monogamous pairing and small family units in supposedly “primitive” societies too, undercutting the idea of a single fixed sequence of stages that every society had to pass through in order.

Boas and the turn toward historical particularism 🔗

Franz Boas became one of the sharpest critics of the evolutionary comparative method. He argued that anthropologists should study specific cultures in their own historical context, in detail, rather than picking out isolated customs from many societies and slotting them into a universal ladder of progress. This approach, later called historical particularism, rejected the idea that cultures could be ranked on a single scale of achievement, and it demanded that anthropologists actually go and gather their own data rather than relying on the secondhand reports that had dominated the evolutionary school. Boas is widely credited with shifting American anthropology away from armchair theorising and toward rigorous, regionally grounded ethnographic fieldwork, an approach detailed further in this university teaching module on historical particularism.

Malinowski and the birth of participant observation 🔗

The most decisive break with the old model came a little later, through Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942). Stranded in the Pacific during the First World War, Malinowski spent extended periods, mostly between 1915 and 1918, living among the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of what is now Papua New Guinea. Rather than passing through briefly or relying on interpreters and reports, he pitched his tent in Trobriand villages, learned the local language, and took part in everyday life alongside the people he was studying. His resulting book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), described the kula exchange system and became one of the founding texts of modern ethnography. This method, which came to be called participant observation, required the researcher to live with a community over an extended period, distinguishing what people said they did from what they actually did in daily life. It effectively became the new standard for anthropological fieldwork, replacing the old reliance on colonial officials and travellers with the anthropologist’s own sustained, immersive presence.

Together, Boas’s regional depth and Malinowski’s immersive method marked a genuine turning point. Anthropology stopped being something scholars theorised about from a distance and became something they had to go out and do, living among people, learning their language, and trying to understand culture the way it was actually experienced by the people living it, rather than the way it looked from a library in London or New York.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Given how much Morgan’s and Tylor’s theories were shaped by the limited data available to them, do you think a similar gap between theory and evidence could exist in social science research today? And now that anthropologists live among the communities they study, what other blind spots might still remain in how fieldwork gets done?

References

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09526951211069512
2. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/social-evolutionism/
3. https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2021/10/20/decolonising-the-archive-cambridge-anthropology-and-torres-strait-island-kastom/
4. https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n4160/html/ch09.xhtml?page=13
5. https://www.britannica.com/science/particularism-anthropology
6. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/76577/1/Unit-4.pdf
7. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bronislaw-Malinowski
8. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2022/12/15/malinowski-and-colonialism/