Introduction

Abstract

The devastating fire in the 200-year-old Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro on September 2, 2018, demonstrates the vital importance of the historiography of sciences and the arts. As most collections have vanished, it is left to the history of science to pick up the pieces and present past developments in their complexity and global entanglements. In this special issue we aim to do this for the work of German and German-speaking anthropologists in Latin America, with a special focus on Brazil, carried out between the 1880s and 1945.