Recreating First Contact

de Alison K. Brown, Robert J. Gordon, Joshua A. Bell

"Recreating First Contact explores the proliferation of adventure travel that emerged during the early twentieth century plus the themes legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During that time, new transport and recording technologies--particularly airplanes, automobiles, and small portable, still and motion-picture cameras--were used by many expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters, and they enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives in the articles, books, films, exhibitions, and lecture tours that the expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through review of several expeditions and their popular wakes, these essays (foreword, introduction + 12 additional chapters, afterward) trace complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel, and cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. In doing so, however, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives, and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered"--