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Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women - Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco - arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms - yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 9, 2021
wow ok, just nothing more to say than that lol, like this was so well written, the stories of the five women were intertwined so well, this is like one of the few non-fiction pieces i've read where im like ya this is enjoyable. The ending of each woman's story was sooo sad literally like,,, reading about Czaplicka's death and Routledge's final years were devastating. really good cool insight into anthropology and women anthrops in early 20th C, and i cannot wait to have a real detailed browse thru the footnotes on the website !! >:3
March 7, 2021
Maria Czaplicka wrote her book, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology, in just eighteen months. Her work was praised as a triumph of translation and synthesis, however, it soon became apparent that she still lacks first-hand knowledge and critical power about her subject. Soon she embarked on an expedition to Siberia with three companions: English ornithologist Maud Doria Haviland, English painter Dora Curtis, and Henry Usher Hall from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to making her breakthrough in her Yenisei Expedition between 1914-1915, she had to face her fate as a woman with women’s second-class citizenship at Oxford.
As Czaplicka was a foreigner originally from Warsaw, at that time in Russian-Poland, her matter was also a social concern for the Delegacy for Women Students who oversaw women’s education at Oxford as it was assumed that she is accustomed to more independent social conditions of university life and might disregard social mores. It was also with well-wishes from her family that she was able to leave Warsaw, where the residents had been forced to speak Russian for years ever since the Partitions of Poland, abandon their customs, and give up any of their intellectual aspirations. But it will soon become apparent that the social circumstances where Czaplicka grew up gave more opportunities for her to be adept in mastering foreign languages and understanding of the Siberian culture that came into fruition with her studies of Shamanism in Siberia which put criticism into the Western perspective of the term ‘Arctic Hysteria’.
Czaplicka’s story is only one of the five women presented in this book who deserved more recognition as laying the foundation in modern British anthropology. They came of age during the time as the discipline of anthropology was transforming from being seen as literature research done from office desk into more of fieldwork which involves living for some considerable period of time in a foreign culture to understand the locals and put the research into writing a book after coming home. The fieldworks offered the five women more freedoms and opportunities, as compared to the limitations imposed upon women in that era in an academic setting. As a discipline, anthropology was a small discipline with limited jobs and plenty of men to take them. Barbara Freire-Marreco, Beatrice Blackwood, Winifred Blackman, Katherine Routledge, and Maria Czaplicka in this book are described as pioneers in British anthropology who took their time conducting field research in foreign areas with primitive cultures that were sometimes still untouched by the Westerners and brought countless potentials for them to be killed. At the time when educating women was still considered radical, subversive, and dangerous, they pursued opportunities to liberate themselves.
As both a biography and literature review of a discipline, Frances Larson does offer us interesting viewpoints to her research. At one point, she seeks to inform us about the state of development that British anthropology had seen in the early 20th century with fieldwork finally be seen as an integral component of anthropological research through the advocacy of Bronislaw Malinowski. His work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which was the result of spending several years studying the indigenous culture at the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia catapulted his position as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe in the 1920s. At another point, Frances Larson is also keen on analysing the roles of the five women in this book who overturned the common narrative of their time which saw women as fragile beings whose sole purpose in life was to get married and borne children. Some of these women faced tragic deaths: Maria Czaplicka committed suicide after failing to secure a grant for her second visit to Siberia, Katherine Routledge was put into a mental asylum after a tragic divorce from her husband who took her family estates, Winifred Blackman died in a mental hospital in England without being able to revisit Egypt because of the Second World War.
Thanks to NetGalley and Granta Books for the electronic Advance Readers Copy.
As Czaplicka was a foreigner originally from Warsaw, at that time in Russian-Poland, her matter was also a social concern for the Delegacy for Women Students who oversaw women’s education at Oxford as it was assumed that she is accustomed to more independent social conditions of university life and might disregard social mores. It was also with well-wishes from her family that she was able to leave Warsaw, where the residents had been forced to speak Russian for years ever since the Partitions of Poland, abandon their customs, and give up any of their intellectual aspirations. But it will soon become apparent that the social circumstances where Czaplicka grew up gave more opportunities for her to be adept in mastering foreign languages and understanding of the Siberian culture that came into fruition with her studies of Shamanism in Siberia which put criticism into the Western perspective of the term ‘Arctic Hysteria’.
Czaplicka’s story is only one of the five women presented in this book who deserved more recognition as laying the foundation in modern British anthropology. They came of age during the time as the discipline of anthropology was transforming from being seen as literature research done from office desk into more of fieldwork which involves living for some considerable period of time in a foreign culture to understand the locals and put the research into writing a book after coming home. The fieldworks offered the five women more freedoms and opportunities, as compared to the limitations imposed upon women in that era in an academic setting. As a discipline, anthropology was a small discipline with limited jobs and plenty of men to take them. Barbara Freire-Marreco, Beatrice Blackwood, Winifred Blackman, Katherine Routledge, and Maria Czaplicka in this book are described as pioneers in British anthropology who took their time conducting field research in foreign areas with primitive cultures that were sometimes still untouched by the Westerners and brought countless potentials for them to be killed. At the time when educating women was still considered radical, subversive, and dangerous, they pursued opportunities to liberate themselves.
As both a biography and literature review of a discipline, Frances Larson does offer us interesting viewpoints to her research. At one point, she seeks to inform us about the state of development that British anthropology had seen in the early 20th century with fieldwork finally be seen as an integral component of anthropological research through the advocacy of Bronislaw Malinowski. His work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which was the result of spending several years studying the indigenous culture at the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia catapulted his position as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe in the 1920s. At another point, Frances Larson is also keen on analysing the roles of the five women in this book who overturned the common narrative of their time which saw women as fragile beings whose sole purpose in life was to get married and borne children. Some of these women faced tragic deaths: Maria Czaplicka committed suicide after failing to secure a grant for her second visit to Siberia, Katherine Routledge was put into a mental asylum after a tragic divorce from her husband who took her family estates, Winifred Blackman died in a mental hospital in England without being able to revisit Egypt because of the Second World War.
Thanks to NetGalley and Granta Books for the electronic Advance Readers Copy.
July 30, 2022
A very interesting and inspiring book of five female early pioneers in the relatively new study of anthropology. The chose to not follow society's expectations of marriage and domesticity to travel to far flung cultures to further their own knowledge and get away from the prejudices of a very male dominated world.
The five stories wove well together as Lawson kept returning to their careers, self doubt, the dangers they put themselves into, the ongoing money issues for four out of the five ... and the ever present limitations set for them by the male hierachy.
All chose to not have children ... and some of the end stories were quite movingly sad. They paid a price for being different!
The five stories wove well together as Lawson kept returning to their careers, self doubt, the dangers they put themselves into, the ongoing money issues for four out of the five ... and the ever present limitations set for them by the male hierachy.
All chose to not have children ... and some of the end stories were quite movingly sad. They paid a price for being different!
May 23, 2021
4.5 Stars: In Undreamed Shores, Frances Larson combines a readable style with insightful scholarship. I was pleased to find that far from being dry, this book kept up the pace by getting stuck in to the adventures had by the 5 female anthropologists it documents.
As anthropology emerged as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century, Larson argues that the few women permitted to engage with the subject used it to transgress the gender boundaries of their domestic societies. The book alternates between vignettes of five key women who were instrumental to the development of anthropology in this period, giving us an insight into their scholarly and personal experiences in equal measure.
I was impressed by how Larson managed to make a compelling academic argument whilst keeping this book fun to read. The first part of the book is probably my favourite, in which Larson opens a window into Oxford at the opening of the twentieth century. Oxford University, which introduced the first ever Diploma in Anthropology in 1906, became a critical nodal point in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Larson paints a wonderful picture of the personalities and atmosphere at the university, which she suggests was a hub of exchange for an increasingly global network of anthropologists. The book then uses the biographical stories to track the development of anthropology from a multidisciplinary, museum-based and material culture-focused pursuit in the 1900s to an academic subject in its own right by the 1920s in which fieldwork was considered essential. I particularly enjoyed Larson’s explanation of how time spent ‘in the field’ came to be seen as essential to anthropological study in the 1920s, contrasting with the older generation of anthropologists for whom the discipline was almost entirely centred on museum curation.
Intentionally or not, Larson’s focus and argument chimes well with the current ‘global turn’ in historical scholarship. This book stays appealing to the general reader whilst making an inventive contribution to global history’s efforts to explore transnational networks of actors and knowledge in the twentieth century. My one problem with this book was that in celebrating the achievements of pioneering women anthropologists, it somewhat skates over the ways in which these women were embedded in colonial hierarchies through their fieldwork. In using colonial spaces to break free from their gendered forms of oppression, they themselves exploited their position at the top of the colonial hierarchy as white European women.
Criticism aside, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in anthropology and the academic world of the early twentieth century.
As anthropology emerged as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century, Larson argues that the few women permitted to engage with the subject used it to transgress the gender boundaries of their domestic societies. The book alternates between vignettes of five key women who were instrumental to the development of anthropology in this period, giving us an insight into their scholarly and personal experiences in equal measure.
I was impressed by how Larson managed to make a compelling academic argument whilst keeping this book fun to read. The first part of the book is probably my favourite, in which Larson opens a window into Oxford at the opening of the twentieth century. Oxford University, which introduced the first ever Diploma in Anthropology in 1906, became a critical nodal point in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Larson paints a wonderful picture of the personalities and atmosphere at the university, which she suggests was a hub of exchange for an increasingly global network of anthropologists. The book then uses the biographical stories to track the development of anthropology from a multidisciplinary, museum-based and material culture-focused pursuit in the 1900s to an academic subject in its own right by the 1920s in which fieldwork was considered essential. I particularly enjoyed Larson’s explanation of how time spent ‘in the field’ came to be seen as essential to anthropological study in the 1920s, contrasting with the older generation of anthropologists for whom the discipline was almost entirely centred on museum curation.
Intentionally or not, Larson’s focus and argument chimes well with the current ‘global turn’ in historical scholarship. This book stays appealing to the general reader whilst making an inventive contribution to global history’s efforts to explore transnational networks of actors and knowledge in the twentieth century. My one problem with this book was that in celebrating the achievements of pioneering women anthropologists, it somewhat skates over the ways in which these women were embedded in colonial hierarchies through their fieldwork. In using colonial spaces to break free from their gendered forms of oppression, they themselves exploited their position at the top of the colonial hierarchy as white European women.
Criticism aside, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in anthropology and the academic world of the early twentieth century.
March 29, 2021
trigger warning
In this book, Frances Larson explores the stories of five women who pioneered in British Anthropology: Katherine Routledge, Barbara Freire-Marreco, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman and Beatrice Blackwood.
At no point does the author claim to have chosen the most important women, or in general the most important anthropologists. She does not explain her choices, though, but they center around all of them having ties to Oxford so it makes sense. The changes of topic from one person to another are very elegantly managed, too.
So, to sum it up in short, since anthropology was a new field, the teachers were fighting for every student who was interested in getting and education on that topic, and since there was enough space, and the teachers were more liberal minded than others, women were given the opportunity to attend classes, though it took a while till every student was eligible for a degree.
Yes, women suffrage is a topic, but not a big one as these five women had other, more pressing problems.
The main one being that officials didn't deem it safe for an unaccompanied woman to live with natives, and in turn if it was deemed safe, it mostly meant that the villages already were praying in church and had abandoned the traditions that made them so interesting in the first place.
The author chose to not include footnotes, but instead the reader can access a page on her website with further information and the relevant sources.
I was not prepared for how grim some of these stories turned out to be. Two of the five women died by suicide, a third was shut away in a mental hospital in a fight for inherited money.
I can hardly fault the author for things that have happened, it's just unfortunate that I turned to this book to distract me from a bad mental health day.
I liked this book. I will read more from the same author, and more on this topic.
I will seek out the works by these five women, especially those on Egyptian peasantry life.
The arc was provided by the publisher.
In this book, Frances Larson explores the stories of five women who pioneered in British Anthropology: Katherine Routledge, Barbara Freire-Marreco, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman and Beatrice Blackwood.
At no point does the author claim to have chosen the most important women, or in general the most important anthropologists. She does not explain her choices, though, but they center around all of them having ties to Oxford so it makes sense. The changes of topic from one person to another are very elegantly managed, too.
So, to sum it up in short, since anthropology was a new field, the teachers were fighting for every student who was interested in getting and education on that topic, and since there was enough space, and the teachers were more liberal minded than others, women were given the opportunity to attend classes, though it took a while till every student was eligible for a degree.
Yes, women suffrage is a topic, but not a big one as these five women had other, more pressing problems.
The main one being that officials didn't deem it safe for an unaccompanied woman to live with natives, and in turn if it was deemed safe, it mostly meant that the villages already were praying in church and had abandoned the traditions that made them so interesting in the first place.
The author chose to not include footnotes, but instead the reader can access a page on her website with further information and the relevant sources.
I was not prepared for how grim some of these stories turned out to be. Two of the five women died by suicide, a third was shut away in a mental hospital in a fight for inherited money.
I can hardly fault the author for things that have happened, it's just unfortunate that I turned to this book to distract me from a bad mental health day.
I liked this book. I will read more from the same author, and more on this topic.
I will seek out the works by these five women, especially those on Egyptian peasantry life.
The arc was provided by the publisher.
March 13, 2021
Well, I’ve not read the book, and I know it is confined to five women, but there does seem to be an oversight. There is a single mention of Sligs Seligman, but according to Google Books not a mention of his wife, my scary great-aunt Brenda. According to Thw International Dictionary of Anthropologists, New York, 1991:
‘Though her husband was professor of anthropology at the University of London and she was his collaborator in both research and writing, Seligman never held an academic post. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1923 and subsequently served as vice-president of the organization; in 1963 she was the first person to receive the Institute's Patron's Medal, in large part due to her unpublicized philanthropy.
In 1959 Seligman was elected president of the Association of Social Anthropologists, a clear indication of the respect in which she was held by the anthropologists of the United Kingdom‘.
He was an FRS, as was one of Brenda’s brothers, but I don’t think they admitted women then.
‘Though her husband was professor of anthropology at the University of London and she was his collaborator in both research and writing, Seligman never held an academic post. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1923 and subsequently served as vice-president of the organization; in 1963 she was the first person to receive the Institute's Patron's Medal, in large part due to her unpublicized philanthropy.
In 1959 Seligman was elected president of the Association of Social Anthropologists, a clear indication of the respect in which she was held by the anthropologists of the United Kingdom‘.
He was an FRS, as was one of Brenda’s brothers, but I don’t think they admitted women then.
November 16, 2021
Bardzo ciekawa pozycja na temat początków antropologii, pozycji i roli kobiet w tych pierwszych latach. Autorka w ciekawy sposób pokazuje, jak możliwość badań terenowych była dla kobiet szansą na niezależność, a jednocześnie jak wiele kosztowała je walka o tę niezależność. Z żalem czytałam, że część ich notatek i materiałów z badań zaginęła. Tą książką jednak odzyskują swoje miejsce w powszechnej świadomości
July 6, 2022
*3, 75
Takhle, je to velmi úzkoprofilová kniha, která nezaujme každého čtenáře. Napsal ji Brit, ale je to taková typicky polská reportáž. Populárně naučná literatura. Kniha pojednává o prvních antropolozkach. Věnuje se polské slavné vědkyni a pak je to o studiu žen na Oxford university a Cambridge university. Ženy ve vědě.. ženy na počátku 20. století. Kariéra a i to, jak snadno je mohl manžel zavřít do blázince třeba. Vše doplněno o fotografie a důkladné rešerše. Hodně informativní.
Takhle, je to velmi úzkoprofilová kniha, která nezaujme každého čtenáře. Napsal ji Brit, ale je to taková typicky polská reportáž. Populárně naučná literatura. Kniha pojednává o prvních antropolozkach. Věnuje se polské slavné vědkyni a pak je to o studiu žen na Oxford university a Cambridge university. Ženy ve vědě.. ženy na počátku 20. století. Kariéra a i to, jak snadno je mohl manžel zavřít do blázince třeba. Vše doplněno o fotografie a důkladné rešerše. Hodně informativní.
September 14, 2024
Bellissimo. È uno sguardo ai tanti pregiudizi in ambito accademico. Abbiamo ancora molto da imparare da queste storie e dalle donne protagoniste. L'università è stata ed è tuttora un ambiente troppo maschilista. Si vedono così tante storie di favoritismi verso gli uomini e di tante forme di discriminazione verso le donne. Stile di scrittura adatto e funzionale al tipo di libro in questione. Non è troppo prolisso né esageratamente riassuntivo.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2025
I found this informative and accessible to me as someone who knew nothing about these pioneering female anthropologists, facing prejudice and breaking down barriers in the early twentieth century, just as the discipline of anthropology was forming. Fascinating social history.
June 30, 2023
The coolest women despite their flaws, og girlbosses 💸💸 a trip to the museum to look at their findings is urgent this was SO INTERESTING and insightful about the challenges of female anthropology and the issues of anthropology in general. I don't manifest my lives ending up like any of theirs though.... I'll stick with the expeditions to Easter Island 😁
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews