The Dawn of the "Chaotic Account": Horatio Hale’s Australia Notebook and the Development of Anthropologists’ Field Notes

Authors

Tom Belton, University of Western OntarioFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Volume

44

Issue

1

Journal

Libraries & the Cultural Record

First Page

138

Last Page

152

Abstract

This paper proposes an archival analysis of notebooks, and their relationships to other parts of personal archives (e.g. journals or diaries). The bulk of the paper is an analysis of the historical development of a particular genre of notebooks: anthropological field notes, “chaotic accounts”, as Branislaw Manilnowski called them, based largely on observation. It provides a review of anthropologists’ own recent literature on the subject, and a short case study of a mid nineteenth century notebook of the American explorer/ethnographer Horatio Hale that serves as an example of one seed out of which anthropological field notes grew.

Notes

Published in: Libraries & the Cultural Record, Volume 44, Number 1, 2009, 138-152. DOI: 10.1353/lac.0.0058