Abstract
THE first session of the International. Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences was opened by H.R.H. Prince George at University College, London, on July 30. The Congress is the outcome of a movement initiated more than twenty years ago, when in 1912, after the London Meeting of the International Congress of Americanists, a small international committee was appointed by the Royal Anthropological Institute to organise such a Congress. As a result of no little negotiation and correspondence, it was then arranged that a Congress should take place in 1916. Owing to the War, the Congress did not meet, and the proposal fell into abeyance, until in the course of the discussion of arrangements for the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, which met in London in 1932, it emerged that the need for an international meeting ground for the discussion of the problems of ethnology was urgently felt. Experience gained by the inclusion of an ethnological section at the archaeological congresses organised after the War by the French Institut d'Anthropologie had proved to the satisfaction of most of those who had taken part that nothing short of an independent congress would prove satisfactory. Many, with good reason, were reluctant to add to the already large number of international scientific congresses; but the almost overwhelmingly heavy programme submitted at this first session is a sufficient proof of the wisdom of the decision. Not merely the number and the variety of the communications, but also the number of joint discussions between two or more sections thirteen discussions in all shows that, even within the limits laid down by those responsible for the organisation of the programme, the debatable questions in ethnology, which it is felt desirable to ventilate by open discussion, are numerous.
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International Anthropology and Ethnology. Nature 134, 173 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134173a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134173a0