Physical anthropology in the field: Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay

The case of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, a Russian naturalist and anthropologist, offers valuable insights into attitudes towards physical anthropology in Australia and the South Pacific in the late nineteenth century. He stayed in the area for a total of fourteen years - an unprecedented duration of fieldwork in an era dominated by seaborne ethnography. As a result of his extended visit, Maclay’s attitudes were shaped by his encounters with Indigenous people in the field and by his communications with European armchair savants. In this chapter we discuss these encounters, together with the anthropological and moral questions posed by Maclay’s collection of mortal remains during his travels. We examine his research interests and collecting methods and provide an overview of subsequent inventories and studies of ancestral remains he collected.