Albert Jenks

Albert Jenks conducted early anthropological fieldwork in the northern Philippines and later held an academic post at the University of Minnesota. The Bontoc Igorot, issued in 1905 by the Philippine government’s Ethnological Survey, records his study of Bontoc communities in northern Luzon. Its chapters address social organization, economic activity, political control, aesthetics, religion, language, and material culture, accompanied by extensive photographs, maps, and a Bontoc vocabulary. The Smithsonian catalogue identifies the volume as a 266-page work by Albert Ernest Jenks and dates it to 1905. Jenks later became a professor and helped establish anthropology as a field of study at Minnesota. The Bontoc Igorot is now read both as a substantial documentary record and as a product of American colonial-era anthropology, so its observations require attention to the institutional setting, terminology, and assumptions under which the research was produced.