Edward Horace Man (1846 – 28 September 1929) was a British administrator and anthropologist who studied the Andaman and Nicobar tribes in the 19th century. His collections of artefacts and photographs are held in the

Pitt Rivers Museum Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed t ...

. Man was the son of Captain Henry Man of the Madras Staff Corps and Emma Martha. Captain Henry Man had helped establish the penal settlement at

Port Blair Port Blair () is the capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India in the Bay of Bengal. It is also the local administrative sub-division (''tehsil'') of the islands, the headquarters for the district of South An ...

and was later briefly Resident Councillor at Singapore before returning to Port Blair. Captain Henry Man took an interest in the Andamanese people and conducted some explorations of kitchen middens at some sites on the islands. Little is known of Man's early life but he joined his father in October 1869 and became an assistant superintendent at the Penal Settlement. He also served as a treasurer from 1869 to 1870 and as officer in charge of the Andaman Homes from 1875 to 1879. Between 1880 and 1882 he visited England on leave and visited various societies and passed on some of his collections to General

Augustus Pitt Rivers Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (14 April 18274 May 1900) was an English officer in the British Army, ethnologist, and archaeologist. He was noted for innovations in archaeological methodology, and in the museum display o ...

. He also worked in the Nicobar Islands briefly. During this period he made linguistic and ethnological studies on the native people, documenting their lives with photographs. Franz Boas credits Man with having offered a slightly more nuanced ethnography of the Andamanese compared to the writings of previous travellers, including Marco Polo. Man was influenced by correspondence with theorists like Augustus Pitt Rivers and his book ''Notes and Queries''.

Maurice Vidal Portman Maurice Vidal Portman (21 March 1860 – 14 February 1935) was a British naval officer, who is best known for documenting several Andamanese tribes between 1879 and 1901 when he was posted as a superintendent of the Andaman Island Penal Colony. ...

considered Man as the Anthropological Institute's "pet" and

Henry Moseley Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic num ...

described him as the kind of collector who might send "four or five entire Nicobar villages with all the inhabitants inside." Man retired in 1900 to England and lived at

Surbiton Surbiton is a suburban neighbourhood in South West London, within the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (RBK). It is next to the River Thames, southwest of Charing Cross. Surbiton was in the historic county of Surrey and since 1965 it has ...

and later Preston Park in Brighton. A monograph of his writings on the Nicobar Islands was posthumously published by his sister Amy Frances. This book ''The Nicobar Islands and Their People'' included a brief biography written by Sir

David Prain Sir David Prain (11 July 1857 – 16 March 1944) was a Scottish botanist who worked in India at the Calcutta Botanical Garden and went on to become Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Life Born to David Prain, a saddler, and his wife ...

. He was made CIE in 1893. His collections are distributed across museums in Cambridge, Oxford, London, Leiden, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Florence, Halifax, Edinburgh, and Calcutta.

References

External links

Collection summary

On the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (1885)
{{Authority control English anthropologists