Customer Reviews

The Andaman Islanders

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This is one of the few standard books on the subject of the Andamanese Negrito - and the earliest written by a professional anthropologist. No serious student of the subject can afford to be without it. Based on field work done by the young Radcliffe-Brown 1906-08, he only published it in 1922, the book undergoing several subsequent reprints and revisions. At the time of his field work, aboriginal society had been under great strain for half a century and was well on the way to extinction. Brown's results therefore have to be taken with some degree of caution, at least far as traditional Andamanese society is concerned. This being the very first work of the inexperienced young scientist, unsurprisingly, there are a number of shortcomings: the book is virtually our only major source on the north Great Andamanese tribes (earlier authors had concentrated on the southern tribes) yet Brown often fails to distinguish between the various northern tribes. This lamentable fact reduces the value of his observations, especially in linguistics. He also did not seem so much interested in collecting new information than in "explaining" and theorizing on the cultural features he found. With hindsight, it would have been very much better if he had gone easy on the theory and collected more new information more carefully. His field work was the last chance to gather anything of value on the traditional Great Andamanese societies shortly before they dissolved altogether. The book can be fairly heavy going in some places but is well written and organized for all that. It even has (unusual for an early book on the Andamanese) a useful index.