Abstract
This chapter focuses on the context and the goal of the early ethnographical collects of string figures. The Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) carried out the first significant study of string figures during the 1898–1899 expedition to the Torres Strait Islands, in collaboration with William H. R. Rivers (1864–1922). In 1902, they published an article in which they explained their methodology for collecting string figures. Indeed, Haddon and Rivers’ nomenclature stimulated and helped some anthropologists to collect string figures in their own fields. Influenced by the theory of diffusionism, most of the ethnographers interested in string figures in the early twentieth century began to collect and compare string figure patterns in order to obtain evidence of contacts between different societies. Haddon and Rivers methodology is precisely described in this chapter, and the reader is encouraged to memorize it and become a practitioner himself.
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Notes
- 1.
Haddon wrote this in the introduction of Caroline Furness Jayne’s String Figures (1906), the first book ever published on the topic of string figures. See Chap. 4
- 2.
Kathleen Haddon (1888–1961) was Haddon’s daughter. He passed on his interest in string figures to her. As a photographer, she accompanied her father in the field many times.
- 3.
See also the chapter “The scientific method of studying decorative art” (Haddon 1895, pp. 306–338).
- 4.
Tricks are generally knot or complicated arrangements of the strings which run out freelywhen pulled (Haddon and Rivers 1902, p. 147).
- 5.
New Zealand anthropologist Diamond Jenness (1886–1969), studied at the University of Wellington in New Zealand and the Balliol College, Oxford. It was during his years at Oxford that he made a one year field study (between 1911 and 1912) in the Goodenough Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Subsequently he became a specialist of the Arctic and participated in several polar expeditions. In 1926, he was appointed director of the National Museum of Anthropology Ottawa.
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Vandendriessche, E. (2015). String Figures and Ethnography. In: String Figures as Mathematics?. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11994-6_2
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