In 1911, after several months living in Santa Clara, the British anthropologist Barbara Freire-Marreco felt she had achieved very little. While at the University of Oxford, she had studied New Mexico’s political institutions, history and collective psychology; now, to get to know its people better, she spent her days husking maize, drying melons and sewing alongside the local women. The problem was that the more real the pueblo’s inhabitants became to her, the more fake she herself seemed. “Real anthropologists get thro’ twice as much in the time”, she fretted. “I wish there had been a better man to take advantage of the opportunities.”
She was probably thinking of men like W. H. R. Rivers, Alfred C. Haddon and Charles Seligman, whose expeditions in the Torres Strait, New Guinea and Sudan had recently transformed anthropological research from an armchair pursuit into a field-based scientific study. Until then, most British scholars with an interest in anthropological questions did not leave their libraries, but relied on travellers’ reports and letters from missionaries and colonial officials stationed abroad to find out about the beliefs and ceremonies of “primitive” peoples, as well as their clothes, food and houses.
Undreamed Shores is a compelling group biography that traces the lives of five women who, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, were among the first to take the diploma in anthropology at Oxford. While female students were welcomed on these new vocational courses, which included geography, education and modern languages, there was little chance of a career in academia for them. Women were expected to be “peripheral, clerical and grateful” for subordinate positions as research assistants and typists.
These Oxford-trained anthropologists wanted to do more, and were among the first to reject the traditional desk-bound “epistolary anthropology”. Larson vividly describes how they gained their independence by going “from the periphery into the unknown”, exploring the forests of New Guinea and traversing the brutal expanse of the Arctic tundra in winter as well as travelling to Easter Island and Arizona. Enviable as some of their journeys might seem, the book makes clear the high price paid by these women in attempting to study human cultural diversity “in the field”.
Their difficulties began with getting financial support. Maria Czaplicka left her family behind in Warsaw in 1910 to pursue her intellectual freedom by studying anthropology at the London School of Economics and Oxford. Hard-working and ambitious, Czaplicka trekked more than three thousand miles through a frozen Siberian winter in search of nomadic reindeer-herders. Her book Aboriginal Siberia: A study in social anthropology (1913) is still a reference point for students, yet she struggled to get an academic post and the funding she needed for a second trip to Siberia.
Katherine Routledge was well off enough to commission her own boat to sail to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in 1914, where she and her husband worked for over a year. Today it is “one of the most intensively studied specks of land anywhere in the world” but before the Routledges arrived, very little about the island’s history was known. She produced the first comprehensive study in The Mystery of Easter Island (1919), yet her research came at a cost. “Visitors to Easter Island, whether scientists, sailors or traders, had always taken things away with them, and the Routledges were no different”, Larson writes. “They started removing small carved stone figures from the sites where they worked, along with spearheads and fish hooks, shells and beads and human bones, all of which they took back to their camp and packed up ready to take home”.
Larson is the author of a biography of Sir Henry Wellcome (An Infinity of Things, 2009). Here she describes how, while male researchers were given a cheque and encouraged to conduct their research as they pleased, women had to provide detailed references and plans, and were given a shopping list of objects to bring back in order to satisfy Wellcome’s avarice. Winifred Blackman, a former cataloguer at the Pitt Rivers Museum, managed to negotiate enough funding to spend nineteen consecutive field seasons living with the agricultural peasants of Upper Egypt, and likened her life in Egypt to being “in a dream”.
A dream it might have been for her and other female anthropologists to escape from social strictures at home, but there were darker elements to their work. Undreamed Shores only briefly touches on the part that these women played in obtaining treasures from the people they studied. “I don’t want to be a mere snapper up of museum specimens”, Beatrice Blackwood complained in the 1930s. She had travelled to New Guinea to pursue an in-depth study of the Anga people, but her fieldwork as a “lady anthropologist” was continuously frustrated by interfering government officials and missionaries, and by constraints on the time she was allotted for her research. So instead, under pressure from her employers at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Blackwood shopped around and brought back more than 2,000 artefacts for their displays.
This is a beautifully written and convincing book that is deeply sympathetic to the difficulties encountered by this first generation of British women anthropologists. It reveals much about how their work at the time was compromised by the myriad ways in which they, and the people they studied, depended on the colonial infrastructure: a truth that the American anthropologist Margaret Mead preferred to keep hidden. By the time Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928, Oxford anthropology already seemed outdated and more concerned with “texts, bones and artefacts” than with the social organization of real people. These female pioneers in anthropology, who wanted to live among the people they studied, ended up being dismissed as mere museum collectors.
Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance author and researcher. She is writing a biography of Cambridge women
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