| Summary: | In this lecture the focus is on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ethnographic work, notably his fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in 1906–8. About the same time, the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen studied the Polar Eskimos in North-West Greenland. While sharing a general quest for ethnographic description of little-known groups, they styled their fieldwork in different ways, saw colonialism in different terms, adhered to different knowledge traditions, and not least, worked in different natural environments. This resulted in very distinct portraits of ‘the natives’, which were to cast long shadows into the present, within which the history of first encounters is firmly embedded.
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