Though study of American Indian cultures had been fostered for several centuries by missionaries and explorers, it was not until he nineteenth century that a disciplined and systematic approach to the study of New World cultures began to emerge. With Schoolcraft, Powell, Boas, and others, an adventurers avocation first became a profession, and it is to these early scholars that we owe the major theoretical perspectives and insights which provided a grounding for American anthropology and folklore studies.
In these twenty-one essays, many of which originally appeared in such now obscure...