Global Journal of Human Social Science, D: History, Archaeology and Anthroplogy, Volume 23 Issue 3

Gunnar Landtman (1878-1940) Leif Korsbaek I. I ntroducción uite recently I wrote 1 that “A. M. Hocart is a very little known British an thropologist” (Korsbaek, in press), which is true. But if that is so, the British anthropologist Gunnar Landtman, born in Finland, is absolutely unknown, at least in the Spanish speaking world. And that, in spite of the fact that he is of a certain importance, at least in the anthropological universe. It is known that a revolution took place in British anthropology 1922, with the publication of Malinowski´s monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific and, to a lesser degree, with the publication the same year of Radcliffe-Brown´s Ph. D. thesis The Andaman Islanders . This revolution left us a new canon in anthropology and, especially, in ethnography, and it is usually thought that Malinowski is the sole responsible for this new anthropological canon. But gradually information is escaping from our collective amnesia that Malinowski was not as alone as he and other anthropologists thought. Together with him in his Melanesian expedition at different moments almost a dozen other British anthropologists carried out fieldwork in Melanesia and New Guinea and, what is no less important, Malinowski was in personal contact with all of them and exchanged information with all of them, one by one. First of all there were three professors from the anthropological world, from Oxford and Cambridge, and from the University of London and the London School of Economics: Alfred Cort Haddon, who was thirty years older than Malinowski, Wiliam Halse Rivers, who was twenty years older, and finally Charles Gabriel Seligman, who was only about ten years older han Malinowski. Haddon had commandeered the famous Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898, but he is probably better known as the founder of anthropology as a career at the University of Cambridge, and he deserves credit for having introduced photography as an important instrument in fieldwork. Haddon distinguishes himself for a number of interests that almos reached the level of obsessions: headhunters, pibes, primitive art and canoes. Normally Haddon has been considered a mediocre fieldworker, but recently surprisingly decent ethnographic material 1 Social Anthropologist from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Doctor in Anthropology, Professor in the Postgraduate Division of Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH)t. has come to our attention, and Haddon has recovered his prestige as ethnographer and fieldworker. Rivers, who also participated in the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait that Haddon organized in 1898, belongs like Haddon to the University of Cambridge. Ha had done fieldwork in India, and in 1914 he published his magnum opus, the History of Meanesian Society, a book everybody knows, but nobody reads it, neither in 1914 nor today, because of its theoretical foundation in diffusionist anthropology. Charles Gabriel Seligman had also participated in the Torres Strait expedition, later he wrote the only existing solid ethnographic description of the societies of New Guinea (Seligman, 1910), and later still he did fieldwork in India, where he introduced a new style that we can call matrimonial fieldwork, together with his wife Brenda Seligman (Seligman & Seligman, 1911). After his Melanesian and Indian career, Seligman ended his life with thirty years´ fieldwork in Africa. It is noteworthy that none of these three early anthropologists had studied anthropologhy in their youth, among other reasons because anthropology did not exist as a career in the universities, they were medical doctors and biologists, with an interest in exotic cutures and societies. We can really call these three early anthropologists the founding fathers of modern social anthropology, based on fieldwork. Apart from the three professors already mentioned, there were also seven students. Of these, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was the first who went into the field with a university career in anthropology behind him; he carried out his fieldwork from 1906 to 1908 in the Andaman Islands off the Indian coast, but he did not finish his ethnographic description, the Andaman Islanders , until 1922. His fieldwork is rather traditional and and mediocre, and does not contribute much to the ethnographic revolution, his contribution is much more important in the theoretical field, where he introduced an empirical structuralism, that was to become structural- functionalism. Arthur M. Hocart and Gerald Camden Wheeer both did fieldwork in Melanesia in 1908 in the Percy Sladen expedition that Rivers organized and directed, Hocart specialized in the study of rituial, while Wheeler did a splendid linguistic study. After his initial fieldwork with Rivers in Simba (at that time it was called Eddystone Island), Hocart got lost seven years in the Pacific, where Haddon secured him a position as headmaster in a school of the Anglican Misson on the Fiji Islands, so he acquired a solid knowledge of the Q © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue III Version I 57 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 D Author: e-mail: leifkorsbaek1941@gmail.com