Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

New Zealander ethnographer, Elsdon Best is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Maori concept of hau. This volume is dedicated to this important scholar, who at the same time was shadowed by metropolitan anthropology and became an excluded ancestor, along with his Maori interlocutors and ethnographic collaborators. By recentering his place as one of anthropology’s ancestors, the volume contributes to a new perception of the discipline’s past.

New Zealander ethnographer, Elsdon Best is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Maori concept of hau. This volume is dedicated to this important scholar, who at the same time was shadowed by metropolitan anthropology and became an excluded ancestor, along with his Maori interlocutors and ethnographic collaborators. By recentering his place as one of anthropology’s ancestors, the volume contributes to a new perception of the discipline’s past.

What if the dead - our dead - never feel to us that they have gone? If family stories, fragments of their lives, continue to nag and haunt us? Lily Hasenburg was just such a figure in Holman's growing years. She was whispered into his ear by grandmother Eunice - in memorable stories of her older sister, who married and moved to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and was later caught up in the Nazi web spun by Adolf Hitler. Unable to shake loose this story, Holman pursued her to Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. Here, we have an account of his pilgrimage; the kind of family history we might bury, and forget - to our loss.