Salubrious Khartoum Building a Colonial

At first glance, this essay may seem an unlikely contribution to the history of anthropology. Its significance for historians of anthropology will become clear as I will explicate three relevant and associated developments that occurred during the period it treats. First, this was the era in which organized anthropology embraced the methodology earlier developed by naturalists; unlike previous anthropologists, who had based their generalizations on information they acquired from hither and yon, anthropologists decided that sound judgments must be grounded in direct observation in the field. For example, in the summer of 1896–97 the University of Melbourne’s first professor of biology, the Oxford-trained Baldwin Spencer, and his collaborator Frank Gillen, who had long been a sympathetic administrator of Australian Aborigines, di