Racked with fever, virtually broke and earning a precarious living through sending back to London the plumes of beautiful birds, Wallace (1823-1913) ultimately became one of the most heroic and admirable of all scientist-explorers. Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

H.Th. Chabot's Ph.D. thesis, Verwantschap, stand en sexe in Zuid-Celebes (1950), is an important source for the anthropology of South Celebes. Chabot's study, based on fieldwork in the 1940s provides insights into social relationships in a South Celebes village, focusing on demographic and spatial data, systems of marriage and the position of women. His observations are of great value for historical-comparative work. This English translation makes Chabot's study accessible to a new generation of researchers. Added to the translation are a biography of H.Th. Chabot (1910-1970) and a biography of is scholarly work, as well as an extensive introduction by Martin Rössler and Birgit Röttger-Rössler, placing Chabot's contribution in the context of other work on Macassarese and Buginese society.