The Ethnographer's Magic may be read at several levels by practitioners from several disciplines: intellectual history, history of science, anthropology, even comparative literature, new cultural history, and literary criticism. Original in its design, it presents the historiographer as composer, responsive to his own lived experience and to those whom he encounters deliberately and by chance, defensive at times, disengaging himself from academic political sensibilities over certain issues, but, above all, a primary researcher into the further reaches of anthropology as a profession and as a discipline. For this collection, Stocking has written comments on each of the eight essays included, as well as an introduction providing autobiographical and historiographical context and an afterwork reconsidering major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology. The essays themselves address the work and influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski; anthropology's powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired ""data"".
