Han F. Vermeulen is Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, specializing in the history and theory of anthropology. He is author or editor of a dozen books, including Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), which was listed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as one of the most important books of 2016 and was awarded the ICAS Book Prize 2017 by the International Convention of Asia Scholars.