Identifier: handbooktoethnog00brit (find matches)
Title: Handbook to the ethnographical collections
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: British Museum. Dept. of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography Joyce, Thomas Athol, 1878-1942 Dalton, O. M. (Ormonde Maddock), 1866-1945
Subjects:
Publisher: (London) : Printed by order of the Trustees
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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h brought civiliza-tion and barbarism intocontact, thus preparingthe way for the com-parative study of man-kind. There were notlacking, even in classicaltimes, minds able to perceive the value of comparison betweenprimitive and developed customs, while more than oneancient historian has left a permanent record of ethnographicalfacts. The interest in primitive life already evinced byHerodotus had become a preoccupation with Caesar andTacitus, whose descriptions of the Gauls and Germans werewritten with a full sense of their possible bearing upon a highercivilization. In the Dark Ages the interest was naturallyrestricted, but it increased once more with the explorations ofthe Arabs and the early European travellers. By the seven-teenth century the reports of explorers had impressed the S^ ;R; lj3Li T^, ^S ^-i.^ i jiP** ^S^ ^^r *^^aSZ L ^ ^4 ^nPQj ^^ •^t<*—1 Pi^^^ ^ •ll 3^^ Ti 1 ^ 1 Fig. 2. — A relic of cannibalism,human bones in the fork of a tree, FijiIslands. INTRODUCTION h
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Fig. 3.—Fish-hooks from Oceania, a, h, and c. Solomon Islands, d, g,and h. Hawaiian Islands, e and/. Tahiti, (a and c aro of tnrtle-shell, therest of pearl-shell.) imagination of statesmen and men of letters like Montaigne,Francis Bacon, and Thomas More ; by the eighteenth, the new-facts which had become common property through thepopularity of great books of travel like tliose of Hakluyt, 10 INTRODUCTION Purclias. and de Bry, or accounts ot* native customs Avritten bymissionaries like Lafitau in Canada, were read by psycho-locrists and ))olitieal philosophers from Locke to Montesquieu.The peiiod ot* the French Revolution, coinciding with thevoyages ot the circumnavigators, witnessed a certain changein the attitude of educated people towards primitive countries.The idealized picture of the simple savage life drawn byRousseau and Diderot at least diffused an interest in primitiveculture among Euiopean nations, even though these writersmerel) used the noble savage as a means to a poli

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