Introduction to 'The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial Administration'

This book is a product of one of those happy pieces of serendipity that can occur in universities. Both editors had an interest in the work of members of the Roth family, Davidson as an archaeologist interested in the documentation of the material culture of 19th century Aborigines, and McDougall as a scholar of postcolonial literatures encountering the Roth name and legend through the fiction of Caribbean novelist and essayist Wilson Harris. We discovered our mutual interest through competition for the same books in the library, and, our curiosity piqued by the coincidence of interest by people of such apparently distinct disciplines, we began to talk. It soon emerged that the grand theme in studies of the Roth family was the question of the relation between a nascent anthropology and a colonial administration.