Comparative ethnography
vThe German enterprise had two major offspring,
the Swedish ethnologists and the students of American material culture. Both
were astonishingly energetic in collating information and publishing
monographs on material culture, both in regional, ethnic and single-item
studies.
vSture Lagercrantz, who died only in November
2001, began publishing distributional studies in the 1920s, and the journal Ethnos
became the home of this type of publication as well as the monographs of Studia Ethnographica Uppsaliensis.
vIn America, this type of data collection is
associated with Franz Boas, but the Field Museum in Chicago was probably
mostly active in publishing studies of material culture, especially Wilfred
Hambly.
vSwedish and American scholars were much less
clear about the intellectual yield of these studies, and Lagercrantz in
particular seemed quite content to publish maps and discussions of sources
with no further conclusions are regards history or social and economic
significance, let alone links to linguistics or archaeology.