'Recreating First Contact explores the proliferation of adventure travel that emerged during the early twentieth century plus the themes legitimized by their associations with popular views of
anthropology. During that time, new transport and recording technologies--particularly airplanes, automobiles, and small portable, still and motion-picture cameras--were used by many
expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters, and they
enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives in the articles, books, films, exhibitions, and lecture tours that the expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial
and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through review of several expeditions and their popular wakes, these essays (foreword, introduction + 12
additional chapters, afterward) trace complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel, and cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their
myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. In doing so, however, this volume examines
these impacts from a variety of national perspectives, and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but
also culturally ordered'--
