In Search of Us

***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick***

The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage. What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about ourselves.

In the late nineteenth century, when non-European societies were seen as ''living fossils'' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like ''savage'' were inconceivable when so-called ''civilised'' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars.

Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude L¿-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore