" Sailor, Novelist, and Scientist-Also Explorer": Frank Burnett, Canada's Kon-Tiki, and the Ethnographic Middlebrow1

There is a people living within the zone of civilization and Christianised influence, upon islands composed of almost magic formation, scattered in strange and tiny groups in the midst of an ocean whose waters are continually being traversed by ships of every nation; withal, a people who, though presenting most other characteristics of their remote ancestors-they are semi-savage, superstitious, crude, and primitive, yet have such a legendary and traditional conception of, and belief in their own advancement and development, that one is forced to reflect anew upon the theory of evolution, and the pristine state of the first created being, who was their, and our common ancestor. - Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's articulation of the social formation and reformulation of taste, it is possible to see that the rise and fall of the ethnographic middlebrow in the early to mid-twentieth century was deeply connected to changing scales of social and cultural value.\n The academic acceptance he sought thus turned out to be Burnett's downfall, as the fields of literature, anthropology, and museum studies developed to exclude the kind of work Burnett undertook.