In this book, Carl Niekerk probes the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, foregrounding how the knowledge transfer between an international array of natural historians and public intellectuals—including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; Voltaire; Denis Diderot; Immanuel Kant; and Johann Gottfried Herder—shaped the emerging discipline and its central debates. Reexamining how these many voices crossed paths and diverged, Niekerk sharpens our understanding of how anthropology, as we know it today, came to be.

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