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Victorian anthropology has been derided as an 'armchair practice', distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterized the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. Sera-Shriar argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study. Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today

This paper situates Alfred Russel Wallace's spiritualist writings from his bookMiracles and Modern Spiritualism(1875) against the backdrop of Victorian anthropology. It examines how he constructed his argument, and the ways in which he verified the trustworthiness of his evidence using theories and methods drawn from anthropology. Spirit investigations relied on personal testimony. Thus the key question was: who could be trusted as a credible witness? While much has been written on Wallace's inquiries into spirit phenomena, very little scholarship has taken seriously his remark about how his studies of spirits and mediums were a "new branch of anthropology." Wallace's aim of aligning his spirit investigations to the practices of British anthropology fed into larger disciplinary discussions about the construction of reliable anthropological data. Most notably, like many of his Victorian anthropological counterparts, Wallace grounded his research in a double commitment to firsthand observation and Baconian inductivism.

Victorian anthropology has been derided as an 'armchair practice', distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterized the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. Sera-Shriar argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study. Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today

Chapter 4. The History of the "Red Man": William Bollaert and the Indigenous People of the Americas / Maurizio Esposito and Abigail Nieves DelgadoChapter 5. Historicizing Humans in Colonial India / Thomas Simpson; Chapter 6. How and Why Darwin Got Emotional about Race / Gregory Radick; Chapter 7. The Comparative Method in "Shallow Time": Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, and Francis Galton / Helen Kingstone; Chapter 8. The Future Evolution of "Man" / Ian Hesketh; Afterword. Historiographical Reflections on the Historicization of Humans in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences / Theodore Koditschek