Books in the History of Anthropology series

George W. Stocking, Jr., has spent a professional lifetime exploring the history of anthropology, and his findings have shaped anthropologists' understanding of their field for two generations. In this autobiography he dissects his upbringing, his politics, even his motivations in writing about himself. The result is a book systematically, at times brutally, self-questioning.

Tracking the Romantic strains in the writings of Rousseau, Herder, Cushing, Sapir, Benedict, Redfield, Mead, Levi-Strauss and others, these essays show Romanticism as a permanent and recurrent tendency within the anthropological tradition.