Anglo-German Anthropology in the Malay Archipelago 1869-1912 : Adolf Bernhard Meyer, Alfred Russell Wallace and AC Haddon

The indigenous inhabitants of New Guinea and surrounding islands, along with so-called ‘Negrito’ groups in mainland Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, stood at the forefront of European anthropological and ethno-logical interest during the second half of the nineteenth century. British and German researchers interested in these groups frequently engaged in transna-tional dialogue and debate: they read, reviewed and translated one another’s work, corresponded on matters of interest, and corroborated or contradicted one another’s conclusions. I illuminate these scholarly connections by focus-ing on the German traveller-naturalist and museum director Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911). His connections with English-speaking colleagues, particu-larly the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, shed light on the mutually constitutive nature of metropolitan knowl-edge and field experience, the role of translation in Anglo-German scholarly dialogue, and the variable interpretation of anthropological data within differ-ent national cultures of scientific knowledge.