The Dawn of the "Chaotic Account": Horatio Hale's Australia Notebook and the Development of Anthropologists' Field Notes

This article is an archival analysis of notebooks and their relationships to other parts of personal archives (e.g., journals or diaries). The bulk of the article is an analysis of the historical development of a particular genre of notebooks: anthropological field notes, or "chaotic accounts," as Bronislaw Malinowski called them, based largely on observation. It provides a review of anthropologists' own recent literature on the subject and a short case study of a mid-nineteenth-century notebook of the American explorer-ethnographer Horatio Hale, which serves as an example of one seed out of which anthropological field notes grew.