First contact (Anthropology)

Contact, First (Anthropology)
Cultural contact
nne First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners
Interethnic contact

Europeans--First contact with other peoples; Wyandot Indians--First contact with other peoples.

Work cat: Jaenen, C. First contact, [2005]: WorldCat record, viewed 14 February 2022 (summary: Examines the period of early contact between Aboriginal peoples and Europeans.) (OCoLC)54500718
Kolodny, A. In search of first contact, [2012]: page xv ("precontact" is a problematic term because it seems to imply the period preceding some certifiable first moment of contact between Europe (or elsewhere) and the Americas, and the word seems to attribute significance to that initial contact moment; my research suggests that the concept of a first contact is a convenient European construction and may not reflect Native American understandings, so the notion of precontact is thus slippery at best and, at worst, inherently imprecise) pages 263-265 (in 1605, a narrative of an expedition published in London claimed no sign that Europeans had been there but descriptions of encounters with Native peoples make clear that they were not the first Europeans to visit, and assertions of firstness may have been political because navigators were often instructed only to occupy lands unknown to Christians; claims to first contact are almost impossible to verify: in addition to known Norse contacts with indigenous peoples, there were many other contacts from Europe--the offshore banks of Labrador, Newfoundland, and Cape Breton were heavily fished starting in the early fifteenth century and there is some evidence of Basque fishing vessels in the Maritimes going back to the late fourteenth century, which is less than fifty years after the last recorded Norse ship to carry a cargo of timber from Labrador, though it is uncertain to what degree these parties ventured onshore or encountered local inhabitants) (DLC)2012011578
Wesson, C. The A to Z of Early North America, 2009: pages xxxv-xxxvii (with the arrival of Europeans in North America during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, contacts between Native Americans and Europeans resulted in extensive changes in indigenous cultures regardless of the culture area under consideration: Europeans introduced diseases for which Native American peoples had no natural immunities, the settlement of the Atlantic Coast forced many coastal groups to move inland, commercial hunting disrupted cultures, cultures throughout the Southwest and Southeast were brought under the Spanish Mission system, Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains cultures had their traditional territories annexed and were removed to distant reservations and small allotments; it is within the context of European contact that the common image of Native Americans was formed: with the introduction of horses and guns to the peoples of the Great Plains and the removal of Native American cultures from the eastern United States, the nomadic cultures of the Great Plains became the stereotypical image of the American Indian; Franz Boas founded the field of American anthropology at the beginning of the 20th century with the imminent demise of Native American cultures in mind and the first generation of American anthropologists was charged with studying the physical, cultural, linguistic, and historical components of Native American peoples before they vanished) (OCoLC)422762667
Encyclopedia of anthropology, [2006]: native peoples of the United States (most demographers assume that the United States supported 5 to 8 million people prior to contact and approximately 8,000 languages were spoken at contact; speculations concerning the origin of Native Americans have riveted scholars since the time of contact: prior to the 1800s, many researchers believed indigenous occupants of North America were remnants of the Lost Tribe of Israel or survivors of Atlantis and that they had degenerated from some ideal Caucasian past, but by the 1800s, ethnological research emerged as a method to study and systematize information about Native Americans and early anthropological researchers inverted European explanations of change by attributing human diversity to societal progression rather than to externally induced factors affecting the mental capacities of individuals; with this shift in paradigms, American scholars speculated that societies progress from savagery to civilization and many researchers assumed that social engineering could accelerate this transition) (DLC)2005013953
The international encyclopedia of anthropology, 2018: interethnic friction (one of the primordial lines of inquiry in Brazilian ethnology; rather than analytically treating indigenous societies as closed totalities, explicable solely in their own terms, researchers in this area emphasize the need to study the institutions and dynamics of interethnic contact; differentiated both from the approach taken by British studies of "cultural contact," and from "acculturation studies") (DLC)2017030366
Britannica academic, Oct. 13, 2021: Māori (first contact; first European contact) Native American religions (a serious misconception about native North American religions is that, before contact with European civilization, they existed in a changeless "Golden Age" and that what happened later can be described only as degeneration, which owes much to the misgivings of many 19th-century Europeans over the deep changes wrought on their own societies by the Industrial Revolution.)
Oxford English dictionary online, viewed 14 February 2022: contact, n. (2. transferred and figurative. a. to come in contact with: to meet, come across, be brought into practical connection with. [Example] 1874 J. R. Green Short Hist. Eng. People iii. §4. 127 A new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more civilized East.) post-, prefix (post-contact adj. Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology (a) existing or occurring in a place or culture outside Europe after the first contact with Europeans; (b) designating a time or place after such contact.)

For works about first contact between specific groups, additional subject headings are assigned of the type [Ethnic group]--First contact with other peoples, e.g., 1. 2.